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.
The sidewalk was barren from car to apartment. Walking the streets was not an American custom, as I had confirmed after observing the neighborhood several times. It was a little past nine o’clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original. I rang the intercom. Allô? he said. When I announced my presence, there was a slight pause before he said, I’ll buzz you in. I took the stairs instead of the elevator to avoid meeting anyone. On the second floor, I peeked into the hallway to make sure no one was there. He opened the door a second after I knocked.
The apartment smelled like home, the scents of fried fish, steamed white rice, and cigarette smoke. I know why you’re here, he said as I sat down on his couch. I clutched the tote bag. Why am I here? I said. Sofia, he said, as serious as I was even though his feet were in fuzzy pink slippers. He wore sweatpants and a gray cardigan. On the dining table behind him hunkered a typewriter with a lip of paper dangling from its roller, the machine abutted by haphazard mounds of documents. Under the dining table’s chandelier, above an ashtray, floated a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, the exhaust from Sonny’s active brain. And on the wall above the table, through that scrim, hung the same clock as in the General and Madame’s restaurant, also set to Saigon time.
We never did have the talk we should have had about her, he said. Our last conversation was uncomfortable. I apologize for that. If we had been decent about it, we would have written you a letter in the Philippines. His unexpected and seemingly genuine concern for my welfare caught me off guard. It was my fault, I said. I never wrote her in the first place myself. We both looked at each other for a moment and then he smiled and said, I’m being a bad host. I haven’t even offered you a drink. How about it? Despite my protestations, he leaped up and went to the kitchen, exactly as Bon predicted. I put my hand on the Walther P22 in the tote bag but I could not find the will to stand up, follow him into the kitchen, and quickly put a bullet behind his ear as Bon had advised. It’s the merciful thing to do, he said. Yes, it was, but the lump of starch in my stomach glued me to the couch, upholstered in a scratchy, stain-resistant fabric designed for motel room trysts. Stacks of books on the industrial carpet sandbagged the walls, and on top of the antique television a silver stereo muttered. Above the armchair, a blotchy, amateurish painting in the style of a demented Monet illustrated an interesting principle, that beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison. Another affordable way to add a drop of loveliness to the world was not to change it but to change how one saw it. This was one of the purposes for the bottle of bourbon that Sonny returned with, a third full.
You hear that? he said, nodding at the stereo. The two of us cuddled the glasses of bourbon in our laps. After all the Cambodian attacks on our border towns, we just raided Cambodia. You’d think we’d had enough of war that we wouldn’t want another one. I thought about how the border clash with the Khmer Rouge was an incredible stroke of good luck for the General, a distraction to keep everyone looking elsewhere than our Laotian border. The problem with winning, I said, is that everyone’s so riled up they’re ready to fight again. He nodded and sipped his bourbon. The good thing about losing is it keeps you from fighting another war, at least for a while. Although that’s not true for your General. I was about to protest when he raised his hand and said, Forgive me. I’m talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.
Even bourbon? I said. He grinned. All right, so perhaps bourbon is not political. I don’t know what to talk about besides politics. It’s a weakness. Most people can’t tolerate it. But Sofia can. I talk to her like no one else. That’s love.
So you’re in love with her?
You weren’t in love with her, were you? She said you weren’t.
If she said so, then I guess I wasn’t.
I understand. Losing her hurts even if you didn’t love her. That’s human nature. You want her back. You don’t want to lose her to someone like me. But please, see it from my point of view. We didn’t plan anything. It’s just that when we started talking at the wedding, we couldn’t stop. Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding,
and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that’s one way I’ve figured out how to describe love. I’ve never been in love before. It leaves me with this strange need to find the right metaphor to describe being in love. Like I am a windmill, and she is the wind. Stupid, yes?
No, not at all, I mumbled, realizing we had broached a topic more problematic than politics. I looked down at the nearly empty glass cupped in my hand, and through the skim of bourbon at the bottom of the glass I saw the red scar. It’s not her fault, he said. I gave her my number at the wedding and asked for hers, because, I said, wouldn’t it be great if I could write an article about how a Japanese sees us Vietnamese? Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And then, if you have not claimed America, where will you go? We can go anywhere, I said. You think that way because you weren’t born here, she said. I was, and I have nowhere else to go. If I had children, they, too, would have nowhere else. They will be citizens. This is their country. And at that moment, with those words of hers, a desire I had never experienced came over me. I wanted to have a child with her. Me, who had never wanted marriage! Who could never imagine being a father!