The Sympathizer (37 page)

The General rustled in the back, rummaging through his pockets. I brought out my lighter. Thanks, Captain. For a brief moment the flame lit the palimpsest of his face. Then the chiaroscuro died and his face was no longer legible. I never told you the story of how I came to spend two years in a communist prison camp, did I? Well, no need for graphic details. Suffice it to say the enemy had surrounded our men at Dien Bien Phu. Not just Frenchmen and Moroccans and Algerians and Germans, but ours, too, thousands of them. I volunteered to jump into Dien Bien Phu, though I knew I would also be doomed. But I could not let my fellow soldiers die while I did nothing. When Dien Bien Phu fell, I was captured along with everybody else. Even though I lost two years of my life in prison, I never regretted jumping. I became the man I am today by jumping and by surviving that camp. But no one asked me to volunteer. No one told me what needed to be done. No one discussed the consequences. All these things were understood. Do you understand, Captain?

Yes, sir, I said.

Very good, then. If what needs to be done is done, then you can return to our homeland. You are a very intelligent young man, Captain. I trust you with all the details. No need to consult me. I’ll arrange your ticket. You will get it when I receive news of what has been done. The General paused, door halfway open. Country club, huh? He chuckled. I’ll have to remember that. I watched him walk up the pathway to his darkened house, where Madame was likely reading in bed, staying awake for his return, as she had waited so often in the villa. She knew a general’s duties extended past midnight, but was she aware what some of these duties included? That we, too, had country clubs? Sometimes, after delivering him to the villa, I stood in my socked feet in the hallway and listened for any signs of distress from their room. I never heard any, but she was too smart not to know.

As for what I knew, it was this: my Parisian aunt had replied and the invisible words that gradually became visible were succinct.
Don’t come back,
Man had written.
We need you in America, not here. These are your orders.
I burned the letter in a wastebasket, as I had burned all the letters, which was until that moment only a way of getting rid of evidence. But in that moment, I confess that burning the letter was also sending it to Hell, or perhaps making an offering to a deity, not God, who could keep Bon and me safe. I did not tell Bon about the letter, of course, but I did tell him of the General’s offer and sought his counsel. He was characteristically blunt. You’re an idiot, he said. But I can’t stop you from going. As for Sonny, nothing to feel bad about. The man’s got a big mouth. This consolation was offered the only way he knew how, at a billiards hall where he bought me several drinks and several rounds of pool. Something about the fraternal atmosphere of a billiards hall reassured the soul. The isolated pool of light over a table of green felt was an indoor hydroponic zone where what grew was the prickly plant of masculine emotion, too sensitive for sunlight and fresh air. After a café, but before a nightclub or home, a billiards hall was where one was most likely to encounter the southern Vietnamese man. Here he discovered that in billiards, as in lovemaking, accurate and true aim was increasingly difficult in proportion to the amount of alchohol consumed. Thus, as the night progressed, our games gradually grew longer and longer. To Bon’s credit, however, the offer he made me was given in our first game, well before the nub of the night wore away to nothing and we numbly left the pool hall in the first minutes of dawn, exiting onto a lonely street whose only sign of life was a flour-dusted baker toiling in a doughnut shop’s window. I’ll do it, Bon said, watching me rack the balls. Tell the General you did it, but I’ll get him for you.

His offer did not surprise me at all. Even as I thanked him, I knew I could not accept it. I was venturing into a wilderness many had explored before me, crossing the threshold separating those who had killed from those who had not. The General was correct that only a man who had received this rite could be allowed to return home. What I needed was a sacrament but none existed for this matter. Why not? Who were we fooling with the belief that God, if He existed, would not want us to acknowledge the sacredness of killing? Let us return to another important question of my father’s catechism:

Q. What is man?

A. Man is a creature composed of a body and soul,

and made to the image and likeness of God.

Q. Is this likeness in the body or in the soul?

A. This likeness is chiefly in the soul.

I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too.

But of course I am talking about not only killing but its subset murder. Bon shrugged at my hesitation and leaned over the table, cue stick resting on his splayed hand. You’re always wanting to learn things, he said. Well, there’s no greater knowledge than in killing a man. He put some english on the cue ball, and when it struck its target it rolled backward gently, aligning itself for the next shot. What about love and creation? I said. Getting married, having children? You, of all people, should believe in that kind of knowledge. He rested his hip on the table’s edge, both hands clutching the pool cue propped on his shoulder. You’re testing me, right? Okay. We have all kinds of ways to talk about life and creation. But when guys like me go and kill, everyone’s happy we do it and no one wants to talk about it. It would be better if every Sunday before the priest talks a warrior gets up and tells people who he’s killed on their behalf. Listening is the least they could do. He shrugged. That’s not ever happening. So here’s some practical advice. People like to play dead. You know how to tell if someone’s really dead? Press your finger on his eyeball. If he’s alive, he’ll move. If he’s dead, he won’t.

I could see myself shooting Sonny, having seen such an act so many times in the movies. But I could not see my finger wiggling the slippery fish ball of his eye. Why not just shoot him twice? I said. Because, smart guy, it makes noise. It goes bang. And who said anything about shooting him even once? Sometimes we killed VC with things other than guns. If it makes you feel any better, this isn’t murder. It’s not even killing. It’s assassination. Ask your man Claude if you haven’t already. He’d show up and say, Here’s the shopping list. Go and bag some. So we’d go into the villages at night with the shopping list. VC terrorist, VC sympathizer, VC collaborator, maybe VC, probable VC, this one’s got a VC in her belly. This one’s thinking of being a VC. This one everybody thinks is VC. This one’s father or mother is VC, therefore is VC in training. We ran out of time before we got them all. We should have wiped them out when we had the chance. Don’t make the same mistake. Take out this VC before he gets too big, before he turns others into VC. That’s all it is. Nothing to feel sorry about. Nothing to cry about.

If it were all so simple. The problem with killing all the Viet Cong was that there would always be more, teeming in the walls of our minds, breathing heavily under the floorboards of our souls, orgiastically reproducing out of our sight. The other problem was that Sonny was not VC, for a subversive would not, by definition, have a big mouth. But maybe I was wrong. An agent provocateur was a subversive, and his task was to shoot his mouth off, agitating others in the spin cycle of radicalization. In that case, however, the agent provocateur here would not be a communist, spurring the anticommunists to organize against him. He would be an anticommunist, encouraging like-minded people to go too far, dizzy with ideological fervor, rancid with resentment. By that definition, the most likely agent provocateur was the General. Or the Madame. Why not? Man assured me we had people in the highest ranks. You’ll be surprised who gets the medals after the liberation, he said. Would I now? The joke would be on me if the General and Madame were sympathizers, too. A joke we could all laugh at when we were commemorated as Heroes of the People.

With Bon’s counsel stashed away, I turned for solace to the only other person whom I could speak to, Lana. I came to her apartment the next week with a bottle of wine. At home she she looked like a college student in her UC Berkeley sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and the lightest of makeup. She cooked like one, too, but no matter. We ate dinner in the living room while watching
The Jeffersons
, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. Afterward we drank another bottle of wine, which helped to soften the heavy lumps of starch in our tummies. I pointed toward the illuminated architectural masterpieces on a hill in the distance, visible through her window, and told her that one of them belonged to the Auteur, whose opus was soon to be released. I had already recounted my misadventures in the Philippines and my suspicion, however paranoid, that the Auteur had tried to kill me. I’ll admit, I told her, that I’ve fantasized about killing him once or twice. She shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette. We all fantasize about killing people, she said. Just a passing thought, like, oh, what if I ran over that person with a car. Or at least we fantasize what it would be like if someone were dead. My mother, for example. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . right? Don’t leave me feeling like I’m crazy here. I had her guitar on my lap, and I strummed a dramatic Spanish chord. Since we’re confessing, I said, I’ve thought about killing my father. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . Did I ever tell you he was a priest? Her eyes opened wide. A priest? My God!

Her sincere shock endeared her to me. Underneath the nightclub makeup and artificial diva gloss she was still innocent, so unsullied that all I wanted was to rub the emollient, creamy pulp of my ecstatic self onto her soft white skin. I wanted to replicate the oldest dialectic of all with her, the thesis of Adam and the antithesis of Eve that led to the synthesis of us, the rotten apple of humanity, fallen so far from God’s tree. Not that we were even as pure as our first parents. If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve, so that what I really wanted was the steamy, hot, jungle dialectic of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Were either of these couplings any better than a Vietnamese girl and a French priest? My mother used to tell me nothing was wrong with being the love child of such a pair, I told Lana. After all, Mama said, we are a people born from the mating of a dragon and a fairy. What could be stranger than that? But people looked down on me all the same, and I blamed my father. When I was growing up, I fantasized that one day he would stand before the congregation and say, Here is my son that you may know him. Let him come before you that you should recognize him and love him as I love him. Or some such thing. I’d have been happy if he would just visit and eat with us and call me son in secret. But he never did, so I fantasized about a lightning bolt, a mad elephant, a fatal disease, an angel descending behind him at the pulpit and blowing a trumpet in his ear to call him back to his Maker.

That’s not fantasizing about killing him.

Oh, but I did, with a gun.

But have you forgiven him?

Sometimes I think I have. Sometimes I think I haven’t, especially when I think of my mother. That means, I suppose, that I haven’t really forgiven him.

Lana leaned forward then, resting her hand on my knee. Perhaps forgiveness is overrated, she said. Her face was closer to me than ever before, and all I need do was lean forward. It was then I committed the most perverse act of my life. I declined, or rather, I reclined, putting distance between me and that beautiful face, the tempting crevice of those slightly parted lips. I should go, I said.

You should go? From the expression on her face, it was clear she had never heard those words before from a man. She would not have looked so astonished if I had asked her to commit the most heinous acts of Sodom. I stood up before I changed my mind, handing her the guitar. There’s something I must do. Before I can do what needs to be done here. It was her turn to recline, amused, and strum a dramatic chord. Sounds serious, she said. But you know what? I like serious men.

If only she knew how serious I could be. I drove the hour between her apartment and Sonny’s with my hands at ten and two o’clock, breathing deeply and methodically to quell my regret at leaving Lana and my nervousness at meeting him. Breathing mindfully was a lesson Claude had taught me, learned from the practices of our Buddhist monks. Everything came down to focusing on the breath. Slowly exhaling and inhaling, one cleared away life’s white noise, leaving one’s mind free and peaceful to be one with the object of its contemplation. When subject and object are the same, Claude said, you don’t shake when you squeeze the trigger. By the time I parked my car around the corner from Sonny’s apartment, my mind was a gull gliding over a beach, carried not by its own will or movement but by the breeze. I took off my blue polo shirt and slipped on a white T-shirt. I kicked off my brown loafers and removed my khakis, then pulled on a pair of blue jeans and beige canvas shoes. Last to go on was a reversible windbreaker, the plaid side exposed, and a fedora. Leaving the car, I carried with me a free tote bag I had received for subscribing to
Time
magazine, inside of which was a small backpack, the clothes I had just shed, a baseball cap, a blond wig, a pair of tinted glasses, and a black Walther P22 with a silencer. The General had given Bon an envelope of cash, and with it Bon had bought the pistol and silencer from the same Chinese gang that had supplied him with the .38. Then he had made me rehearse the plan with him until I had memorized it.