Drunken Love, Que Son [jenna bush book club TXT] 📗

Chapter One

Nobody knows Shakespeare has reincarnated and is hiding in Brooklyn.

For the last five hundred years the English reading world has worshiped Shakespeare as a literary genius; and for centuries, he had been watching the reverence from the vantage point of the bardo. Shakespeare did not go to hell, and did not go to heaven either. What he did was hovering in the no-man's region between heaven and hell, waiting for an opportunity to come back to earth. And forty five years ago, he had his chance: he reincarnated as a human. But in this life, Shakespeare is a nobody. People do not recognize him on the streets because he does not resemble his old body as the great playwright of five hundred years ago. He does not look any bit like the black and white sketches of himself in the textbooks that people are familiar with: a distinguished Caucasian gentleman with a pensive gaze, a goatee, and a funny looking shirt collar. Instead, in this life he has black eyes, black hairs and yellow skin. He remembers in details his past life in medieval England, and he also remembers all the plays he wrote back then. Despite the immortal fame, he does not mind being unknown in this life: he is the type of man who keeps a low profile while knowing his own worth. He still possesses the literary prowess of the old Shakespeare, but does not produce anything worth publishing. He understands the taste of people today is different from that of people five hundred years ago; and if he, the legendary Shakespeare, wrote again in the same manner he did back then, they would laugh him out of existence. But the style of those old plays is the only thing he is good at, the stanzas, the ancient English, the thee's and the thou's, the kind of incomprehensible crap that bores today's high school students to death. So what he writes now he keeps to himself.

It is the last day of the year and Shakespeare has taken a day off from his job at a Manhattan hospital. It is cold in his room this afternoon and steam is coming out of his nose. The slumlord does not provide enough heat for the basement studio he lives in. But Shakespeare does not care about the cold, he is too absorbed in thoughts. He thinks about the tragedies he has written that made such a lasting impact on the consciousness of the English reading people. He thinks about the most famous of his plays The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet--and he is bothered. The story of these two young lovers should not have ended in deaths, he now thinks. They are too young to die. Such a waste of life. Does not make sense. The story should have had a happy ending. Suppose the young lovers say fuck the adults fuck the families to hell with the hate and just take each other's hands and run off into the sunset and live happily ever after, producing 12 children. Would that be much better and more humane? Shakespeare thinks so.

Now he likes the idea of lovers living happily together forever. Shakespeare decides that the story must be retold and he must give it a happy ending. This time the setting would not be in medieval Italy but it will take place in modern times, his times, in two countries called Viet Nam and the United States. The lovers would have different names, and their names would be English, not Italian. He will call it The Story of Adam and Eve.

So, composing himself, Shakespeare sits, concentrates, and lets fly his imagination:

Adam wanted to get the story straight, so he reviewed what he thought he knew about what had happened. He recalled that in 1980 he left Viet Nam on a sea voyage after four years living the life of a drifter. Before hitting the water, he and Eve had not seen each other for about a year. They were in love with each other. After reaching Hong Kong, Adam wrote home to tell his family that he had landed safely. He stayed in Hong Kong for six months, then moved on to the United States, quite a distance from the land he had left behind. And he thought, on arriving in the new country, that this was his final stop. He wrote home again to let his family know where he had ended up and told them not to worry about him.

One day, a few months after he had settled in, he received a letter from Viet Nam, it was Eve's. In the letter she said she missed him terribly, and promised that because the earth was round they would see each other again and wished that one day she could join him in America--and ended the letter by telling him not to drink late at night. Adam was moved by what Eve wrote, he thought about her, and remembered what had happened between them: they fell madly in love when they were seventeen. It was puppy love, pure as falling snow, and beautiful like a fairy tale. They were so innocent they did not even dare touch each other's hands. The love was all in the heart and the mind. It was angelic. But life was difficult and it torn them apart.

After reading the unexpected letter, Adam, desperate, wrote back, telling Eve that she must abandon all hope because there was such a wide and deep ocean between them, that his departure might be a one way trip, that he had no hope of seeing her and the homeland again, all because of the political situation there, that his ties to home might have been severed forever, and that she had better forget him and move on with her life. When Adam was writing these sad words, he sincerely believed that he could never go home again. Then the letters between them stopped and they lost touch.

For five or six years Adam dived into and stayed under the water and became mute--as far as his family was concerned. He contacted no one back home and never heard anything from anyone. He moved around constantly and never had a permanent address. He was sucked into the life in America. For all concerned parties, he had vanished without a trace. The turbulence of life slowly erased memories of home from his mind. Then one day he woke up, perhaps after a drunken night, and said shit I have totally forgotten about my family and all I left behind, where have I been, what has happened to me? I am a bad son, I had better write and let them know I am still alive and ok, otherwise they will continue to worry as they--for sure--have been worried all these years while I was off the radar screen. Thus correspondence with the family was reestablished. During those lost years, sometimes he thought about Eve but the thoughts would not stay on his mind for long. He believed she was now burdened with a family of her own, just like he was busy with his own life.

In 1992, the political situation in Viet Nam suddenly changed, and the government allowed visitors back in again. So Adam went home for a visit. One of the thoughts he had while on the trip back was that he would see Eve, the love of his life, again, and he felt anxious at the prospect. As the airplane landed in Ho Chi Minh City, he said I am home, and cried: it felt so good to come back. And he had though he could never see his homeland again.

Besides visiting the family, he planned to look for Eve but later found out from a relative that she had gone and was now living in America too--and she was married with two children. Someone even showed him her wedding pictures and Adam thought she looked strange in the pictures. Disappointed, he walked around the city and every corner reminded him of Eve. He remembered her pretty face and pearly eyes, her round ass and small tits and long black hair. He remembered their secret meetings at various street corners at dusk, the nervousness and the ecstasy when they sat next to one another, the intense joy of loving, the delirious pain in his heart when she was away and he went looking for her, the hallucination of her face when he missed her, how he ejaculated when he held her hand for the first time (after much courage)--things like that. All the memories rushed back, and it made him sad.

After the visit, he returned to America and went on with his life while thoughts about Eve lingered on his mind. Then one day just a month after the visit he received a letter from Eve, totally unexpected--someone back home must have leaked his address to her. The letter confirmed that she had been in the America for years. She wrote that she had gone to sea two years after him. And after two years living in camps in Thailand, she came to settle in the America. She added that she had waited for him for years to no avail, and she had to get married because circumstances forced her to, that she was indebted, pressured and obligated to the man who was now her husband. Besides, as far as Eve was concerned, Adam had disappeared and she had no hope of finding him.

He wrote back to her, respectfully but with a hint of regret, saying that he was glad she was ok and wished her happiness. But Adam was somewhat doubtful about the sincerity of what Eve wrote. Waited? Probably. Looked for? Perhaps never. From what Adam had learned, Eve came to America with a relationship with another man she had met while in Thailand; and the affair continued after she arrived in America and it resulted in marriage. Eve probably had waited for Adam for some times. But she had never looked for him even after she was in the America, despite knowing that she was now sharing the same sky with him. However, Adam thought he could not blame her, because he too had put her out of his mind during all these years. She had her life to live and he had his. But in her letter, Eve hinted that it was Adam who had abandoned her, that it was his fault that they did not become husband and wife even though fate had meant for them to cross each other's path and perhaps be together. After two or three letters--Eve also sent him pictures of her husband and children--Adam let the matter stand where it was. But it did cause a brief disturbance in the life he was living. He even talked to her once on the phone. And she sounded so different. She did not even speak with the Hue accent that he remembered she had back then. Then they stopped the communication.

And years passed, Adam thought no more about it, but after picking up clues and innuendos here and there, he was convinced that something tragic had happened to Eve while she was on the sea voyage in the Gulf of Thailand. He believed that her boat had been attacked by the pirates and she was raped, perhaps repeatedly during the thirteen days drifting on the sea--the same fate that befell at least half of the people who dared sail across the Gulf during that time. When he imagined the horror, the physical pain, the indignity, the humiliation she had to endured through the rapes, and the trauma it had left her with for the rest of her life, he felt as if a