The Sympathizer (42 page)

We have to move, said the dark marine. No one’s coming now but they will when it’s light. The grizzled captain said nothing. Did you hear me? The grizzled captain said yes. Then do something, said the dark marine. We’ve got to be as far away from here as possible before morning. The grizzled captain said to bury him. When the dark marine said that was going to take too long, the grizzled captain gave the order to carry the body with us. We divvied up the lieutenant’s ammunition and gave his rucksack to the Lao farmer, with the dark marine carrying the lieutenant’s M16. The hefty machine gunner handed his M60 to the darker marine and picked up the lieutenant’s body. We were about to set off when the gunner said, Where’s his leg? The dark marine turned on his flashlight. There the leg lay, served on a bed of shredded ferns, meat tattered and strips of black cloth still clinging to it, mangled white bone jutting through a jagged rip in the flesh. Where’s the foot? said the dark marine. I think it was just blown away, said the philosophical medic. Bits of pink flesh and skin and tissue hung on the ferns, already crawling with ants. The dark marine grabbed the leg, and when he looked up I was the first one he saw. It’s all yours, he said, thrusting the leg at me. I thought about refusing it, but someone else would have to carry it.
Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.
If someone else had to do this, I could, too. It was only a hunk of meat and bone, its flesh sticky with blood and gritty with embedded dirt. When I took it and brushed off the ants, I found it to be a little heavier than my AK-47, the leg having been detached from a smallish man. The grizzled captain ordered us to march and I followed the hefty gunner, the lieutenant’s body slung over his shoulder. The lieutenant’s shirt had ridden up his back, and the exposed plank of flesh was blue in the moonlight.

I carried his leg with one hand, my other hand on the strap of the AK-47 hanging from my shoulder, and the burden of carrying a man’s leg seemed far heavier than carrying a man’s body. I carried his leg as far away from me as possible, its weight growing more and more, like the Bible my father made me hold in front of the classroom as punishment for some transgression, my arm outstretched with the book on the scale of my hand. I carried that memory still, along with the memory of my father in his coffin, corpse as white as the affectless lieutenant’s protruding bone. The chanting of the congregation in the church hummed in my ears. I had learned of my father’s death when his deacon called me at police headquarters. How did you get this phone number? I said. It was in the father’s papers on his desk. I looked at the document on my own desk, a classified investigation about an unremarkable event last year, 1968, when an American platoon had pacified a mostly abandoned village near Quang Ngai. After executing the water buffalos, pigs, and dogs, and after gang-raping four girls, the soldiers had gathered them as well as fifteen elders, women, and children in the village square, where they fired on them until they were dead, according to a regretful private’s testimony. The platoon leader’s report certified that his men had killed nineteen Viet Cong, although they had recovered no weapons besides some spades, some hoes, a crossbow, and a musket. I don’t have time, I said. It would be important for you to go, said the deacon. Why would it be important? I said. After a long pause, the deacon said, You were important to him and he was important to you. It was then I knew, without any need for words, that the deacon was aware of who my father was.

We ended our forced march after two hours, the same amount of time devoted to my father’s funeral Mass. A creek gurgled in the arroyo where we stopped and where I scratched my face against a vine of bougainvillea. I set down the leg as the marines began digging a shallow grave. My hand was gummy with blood and I knelt by the creek to wash it in the cold water. By the time the marines finished, my hand was dry and a faint stroke of pink light was on the horizon. The grizzled captain unrolled the affectless lieutenant’s cape of palm leaves and the hefty machine gunner laid his body on it. I only realized then that I would have to bloody my hand again. I picked up the leg and put it in its place. In the pink light I saw his open eyes and slack mouth, and I could still hear him screaming. The grizzled captain closed the eyes and mouth and wrapped his body in the cape, but when he and the hefty machine gunner lifted the body, the leg slipped out of the cape. I was already wiping my sticky hand on my pants but there was nothing to do but pick up the leg once more. After his body was lowered into the grave, I leaned in and tucked his leg under the cape, below his knee. Glistening worms were already wriggling out of the earth as I helped scoop dirt back into the grave. It was just deep enough to cover our tracks for a day or two, until the animals dug up the corpse and ate it. What I want to know, said Sonny, squatting by me as I knelt by the grave, is whether the lieutenant will hang around here with one leg or two, or whether he’ll have worms crawling out of his eyes or not. Truly, said the crapulent major, head sticking out of the grave as he talked to me, it’s a mystery what shape a ghost will take. Why am I all here except for this hole in my head and not a disgusting mess of bones and meat? Tell me that, won’t you, Captain? You know everything about everything, don’t you? I would have answered if I could, but it was hard to do so when I felt that I, too, had a hole in my head.

The day passed with us undiscovered, and by late in the evening, after a short march, we reached the banks of the Mekong, gleaming under the moonlight. Somewhere on the other side you were waiting for me, Commandant, as well as the faceless man who is the commissar. While I was still innocent of this knowledge, it was impossible not to sense something foreboding as we plucked off the leeches adhering to us with the stubbornness of bad memories. We had been carrying them without knowing, until the Lao farmer pulled an animated black finger from his ankle. I could not help but wish, prying away a little monster sucking my leg, that it was Lana thus attached to me. The skinny RTO radioed the base camp, and while the grizzled captain reported to the admiral, the marines again showed they were good for something by constructing a raft of bamboo trunks strapped together with lianas. Four men could row themselves across the river with makeshift paddles fashioned of bamboo, with the first team trailing a rope carried by the darker marine. That rope, tied to a tree on either side of the river, would guide the darker marine on his return with the raft. It would take four trips to transport all of us, and the first group set off before midnight: the darker marine, the Hmong scout, the hefty machine gunner, and the dark marine. The rest of us were scattered on the exposed bank, huddled under our capes of leaves, backs to the river and weapons aimed at the vast forest crouched on its haunches.

A half hour later the darker marine returned with the raft. Three more went with him, the Lao farmer, the darkest marine, and the philosophical medic, who, at the affectless lieutenant’s grave, had said as a kind of benediction, All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead. What the hell does that mean? said the dark marine. I knew what it meant. My mother was not dying because she was dead. My father was also not dying because he was dead. But I was on this embankment, dying, because I was not yet dead. What are
we
, then? asked Sonny and the crapulent major. Dying or dead? I shivered, and gazing into the darkness of the forest, staring down the length of my weapon, I saw the shapes of other ghosts among the haunted trees. Human ghosts and beast ghosts, plant ghosts and insect ghosts, the spirits of dead tigers and bats and cycads and hobgoblins, vegetable world and animal world heaving with claims to the afterlife as well. The entire forest shimmered with the antics of death, the comedian, and life, the straight man, a duo that would never break up. To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.

Hey, hissed the grizzled captain, it’s your turn. Another half hour must have passed. The raft was scraping onto the bank again, pulled along the rope by the darker marine. Bon and I rose along with Sonny and the crapulent major, ready to follow me across the river. I remember the river’s white noise, the soreness of my knees, and the weight of my weapon in my arms. I remember the injustice of how my mother never came to visit me after her death no matter how many times I cried out for her, unlike Sonny and the crapulent major, whom I would carry with me forever. I remember how none of us looked human on the riverbank, shrouded by our capes of leaves, our faces painted black, clutching weapons extracted from the mineral world. I remember the grizzled captain saying, Take the paddle, as he thrust it at me, right before a whip snapped by my ear and the grizzled captain’s head cracked open, spilling its yolk. A fleck of something wet and soft landed on my cheek and a thunderous racket rose on both sides of the river. Muzzle flashes rippled on the far side and the boom of grenades rent the air. The darker marine had taken one step off the raft when a rocket-propelled grenade whooshed by me and struck the raft, shattering it in a hail of fire and sparks and throwing him into the shallow water lapping against the riverbank, where he lay not quite dead, screaming
.

Get down, dumbass! Bon pulled me to earth. The skinny RTO was already returning fire into our side of the forest, the sound of his submachine gun hammering my eardrums. I could feel the volume of the guns and the velocity of the bullets passing overhead. Fear inflated the balloon of my heart and I pressed my cheek into the earth. Being on the bank’s downward slope saved us from the ambuscade, keeping us below the eyeline sight of the forest’s vengeful ghosts. Shoot, goddammit, said Bon. Dozens of insane, murderous fireflies flickered on and off in the forest, only they were muzzle flashes. To shoot I would have to lift my head and take aim, but the guns were loud and I could feel their bullets striking the earth. Shoot, goddammit! I lifted my weapon and aimed it into the forest, and when I squeezed the trigger the gun kicked me in the shoulder. The muzzle flash was so bright in the darkness that everyone who was trying to kill us now knew exactly where I was, but the only thing to do was to keep squeezing the trigger. My shoulder was hurting from the gun kicking me, and when I paused to eject a magazine and load another, I could feel my ears aching as well, subjected to the stereophonic effects of our firefight on this side of the river and the clash of the ignorant squads on the other side. At any moment I feared that Bon would rise and order me to charge with him into the enemy’s fire, and I knew that I would not be able to do it. I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

All of a sudden they stopped shooting at us and it was just Bon and me blasting at the darkness. Only then did I notice that the skinny RTO was no longer joining in. I paused once more in my shooting and saw, under the moonlight, his head bowed over his silent gun. Bon was the only one still firing, but after discharging the last of his magazine he, too, stopped. The firefight across the river had already ceased, and from the other side a few men were shouting in a foreign language. Then, from the recesses of the gloomy forest on our side, someone called out in our language. Give up! Don’t die for nothing! His accent was northern.

All was quiet on the riverbank except for the river’s throaty whisper. No one was screaming for his mother, and it was then I knew that the darker marine was also dead. I turned to Bon and in the lunar light I saw the whites of his eyes as he looked at me, wet with the sheen of tears. If it wasn’t for you, you stupid bastard, Bon said, I’d die here. He was crying for only the third time since I had known him, not in that apocalyptic rage as when his wife and son died, or in the sorrowful mood that he shared with Lana, but quietly, in defeat. The mission was over, he was alive, and my plot had worked, no matter how clumsily or inadvertently. I had succeeded in saving him, but only, as it turned out, from death.

CHAPTER 19

O
nly from death? The commandant appeared genuinely wounded, his finger resting on the last words of my confession. In his other hand was a blue pencil, the color chosen because Stalin had also used a blue pencil, or so he told me. Like Stalin, the commandant was a diligent editor, always ready to note my many errata and digressions and always urging me to delete, excise, reword, or add. Implying that life in my camp is worse than death is a little histrionic, don’t you think? The commandant seemed eminently reasonable as he sat in his bamboo chair, and for a moment, sitting in my bamboo chair, I, too, felt that he was eminently reasonable. But then I remembered that only an hour earlier I had been sitting in the windowless, redbrick isolation cell where I had spent the last year since the ambush, rewriting the many versions of my confession, the latest of which the commandant now possessed. Perhaps your perspective differs from mine, Comrade Commandant, I said, trying to get used to the sound of my own voice. I had not spoken to anyone in a week. I’m a prisoner, I went on, and you’re the one in charge. It may be hard for you to sympathize with me, and vice versa.

The commandant sighed and laid the final sheet of my confession on top of the 294 other pages that preceded it, stacked on a table by his chair. How many times must I tell you? You’re not a prisoner! Those men are prisoners, he said, pointing out the window to the barracks that housed a thousand inmates, including my fellow survivors, the Lao farmer, the Hmong scout, the philosophical medic, the darkest marine, the dark marine, and Bon. You are a special case. He lit a cigarette. You are a guest of myself and the commissar.