Sublime

as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.

Possibly the magnificent accent with which I’d shouted “Mynheer” impressed him, for he spoke Dutch, none of which I understood. I spoke English, which he doubtless understood. His tanned face showed pale creases where, in the sun, he had laughed. Pleased, he thanked me, and before wandering off, he looked at me significantly. So: his look said, we

Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the

He still felt coreless—he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way.