Sympathizer

  Can I have another drink?

  Of course! He refilled my glass. You stupid bastard, Bon’s voice in my head said. You’re making this worse. Get it over with. Now, Sonny continued, I realize that so far as children and fatherhood goes, it’s more dream than possibility. Sofia is past her childbirthing years. But there’s adoption. I think it’s time to think of someone else besides me. Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that’s where revolutions start! And it’s the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That’s what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.

  With that, he lapsed into silence. My resolve was so weakened I could not raise my right arm to reach into the bag for the gun. Listen, I said. I have something to confess to you.

  So you do love Sofia. He looked genuinely sad. I’m sorry.

  I’m not here because of Ms. Mori. Can we just talk about politics instead?

  As you wish.

  I asked you before if you were a communist. You said you wouldn’t tell me if you were. But what if I told you I was a communist? He smiled, shaking his head. I don’t believe in the hypothetical, he said. What’s the point of playing a game of what or who you might be? It’s not a game, I said. I am a communist. I’m your ally. I have been an agent for the opposition and the revolution for years. What do you think about that?

  What do I think? He hesitated in disbelief. Then his face turned bright red in fury. I don’t believe it at all is what I think. I think you’ve come here to trick me. You want me to say I’m a communist, too, so you can kill me or expose me, don’t you?

  I’m trying to help you, I said.

  How exactly are you trying to help me?

  I had no answer to his question. I confess that I do not know what brought me to make my confession to him. Or, rather, I did not know then, but perhaps I do know now. I had worn my mask for so long, and here was my opportunity to take it off, safely. I had stumbled to this action instinctively, out of a feeling that was not unique to me. I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, and anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?

  Did the General put you up to this? he said. I can see the two of you plotting away. If I was gone, it would be good for him and for you, no doubt.

  Listen to me—

  You’re jealous because I have Sofia, even though you don’t even love her. I knew you’d be angry, but I didn’t think you’d stoop this low and come bait me. How stupid do you think I am? Did you think you’d suddenly be attractive to Sofia again if you said you were a communist? You don’t think she’d smell your desperation and laugh in your face? My God, I can’t even imagine what she’ll say when I tell her—

  Although it seems impossible to miss from five feet away, it is very possible, especially after too much wine and a tumbler or two of bourbon suffused with the bitter peat of the past. The bullet punctured the radio, muffling but not silencing it. He looked at me in utter astonishment, his gaze fixed on the gun in my hand, the silencer adding a few more inches. I had stopped breathing, my heart had ceased beating. The gun jerked and he cried out, pierced in the hand that he had flung up. Suddenly awakened to his impending death, he leaped to his feet and turned to run. The third bullet struck between shoulder blade and spine, staggering but not stopping him as I jumped over the coffee table, catching up before he reached the door. Now I was in the ideal position, or so Bon told me, a foot behind my subject, in his blind spot, where one really could not miss. Click, clack went the gun, one bullet behind the ear, another in the skull, and Sonny fell face-first with enough graceless weight to break his nose.

  I stood over his prone body, cheek down on the carpet, copious amounts of blood gushing from the holes drilled in his head. At the angle at which I stood, behind him, I could not see his eyes but I could see his upturned hand with the bloody hole in his palm, his arm bent awkwardly beside him. The lump of starch had dissolved, but now its liquid results sloshed in my guts and threatened to spill. I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. I thought of Ms. Mori, most likely at home, cat on her lap, reading a radical feminist treatise, waiting for Sonny to call, the call that never would come, the call that defined our relationship to God, whom we forlorn lovers were always calling. Now Sonny had crossed the greatest divide, leaving behind only his cold, darkened shade, his lamp forever extinguished. On the back of his cardigan a crimson stain spread, while around his head a bloody halo swelled. A wave of nausea and chills shook me, and my mother said, You’ll be better than all of them, won’t you, my son?

  I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, once, twice, and one more time, slowing my shaking to a trembling. Remember, Bon said inside my head, you’re doing what has to be done. The list of other things in need of doing returned. I took off my windbreaker and T-shirt and put my blue polo shirt back on. The jeans and canvas shoes came off, replaced by khakis and loafers. I reversed the windbreaker to expose the plain white side, swapped the fedora for the wig, its blond hair touching the base of my neck, and put on the baseball cap. Last came the tinted glasses, my change complete after the tote bag and the gun went into the backpack. The wig, cap, and glasses were Bon’s idea. He had made me try the look on in front of the bathroom mirror, foggy with a year’s worth of spattered toothpaste foam. See? he said. Now you’re a white man. To me I still looked like me, hidden by a disguise much too normal for a masked ball or a Halloween party. But that was the point. If someone did not know what I looked like, I did not look like I was in disguise.

  I wiped the fingerprints off my glass with my handkerchief, and it was with the handkerchief wrapped around the doorknob that I thought I heard Sonny moan. I looked down at the back of his shattered head, but I could hear nothing more above the thrumming of blood in my ears. You know what you have to do, Bon said. I got on my knees, lowering my face to look Sonny in his one exposed eye. When the liquid contents of my dinner rose up against the back of my throat, I clapped my hand over my mouth. I swallowed hard and tasted vileness. Sonny’s eye was lusterless and blank. He must surely be dead, but as Bon had told me, sometimes the dead did not know they were dead yet. So it was that I reached forth my index finger, slowly, closer and closer to that eye, which moved not at all. My finger hovered an inch before the eye, then a few millimeters. No movement. Then my finger touched that soft, rubbery eye, the texture of a peeled quail egg, and he blinked. I jumped back as his body shuddered, just a little, and then I fired another bullet into his temple from a foot away. Now, Bon said, he’s dead.

  I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and almost threw up. A little more than three minutes had elapsed since the first shot. I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and my liquid contents achieved precarious equilibrium. After all was still, I opened Sonny’s door and walked out with presidential confidence, as Bon recommended. Breathe, Claude said. So I breathed, running down the echoing stairway, and I breathed once more as I exited into the lobby, where the front door was opening.

  He was a white man, the lawn mower of middle age having blazed a broad swatch of baldness through his hair. The well-tailored, cheap-looking suit bolted to his considerable body implied he worked in one of those low-paying professions where appearances counted, where one worked on commission. His wingtips glistened with the sheen of frozen fish. I knew all this because I looked at him, which Bon said not to do. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t give people a reason to give you a second look. But he did not even look at me. Eyes straight ahead, he walked by as if I were invisible, a ghost or, more likely, just another unremarkable white man. I passed through his vapor trail of artificial pheromone, the dime-store cologne of the macho male, and caught the fron
t door before it closed. Then I was on the street, breathing in the Southern Californian air, fine-grained with the particulates of smog, heady with the realization that I could go wherever I wanted. I made it as far as my car. There, kneeling by the wheel well, I vomited, heaving until nothing was left, staining the gutter with the tea leaves of my insides.

  Chapter 17

  It’s normal, Bon said the next morning. He soothed the hematoma swelling from my mind with the aid of a fine bottle of scotch, granted by the General. It just had to be done, and we’re the ones who have to live with it. Now you understand. Drink up. We drank up. You know what the best cure is? I had thought the best cure was to return to Lana, which I had done after leaving Sonny’s apartment, but even an unforgettable evening with her had not helped me forget what I had done to Sonny. I shook my head slowly, careful not to rattle my bruised brain. Getting back to the battlefield. You’ll feel better in Thailand. If that was true, then fortunately I did not have to wait long. We were leaving tomorrow, the scheduling planned to help me avoid any possibility of entanglement with the law and to avoid my plot’s obvious weakness, Ms. Mori. On hearing of Sonny’s death, her first thoughts might be confused, but her subsequent thoughts would turn to me, her jilted lover. The General had trusted that I would get the deed done on the date I promised, and he had provided me with my ticket the previous week. We were in his office, the newspaper on his desk, and when I opened my mouth, he lifted his hand and said, It goes without saying, Captain. I closed my mouth. I inspected the ticket, and that evening I wrote my Parisian aunt. In code, I told Man that I accepted responsibility for disobeying his orders, but that I was returning with Bon to save his life. I did not inform Man of my plan for how to do that, because I still did not have one. But I had gotten Bon into this situation, and it was up to me to get him out of it if I could.

  So, two days after the deed was done, with no one yet having noticed Sonny’s absence, except, perhaps, for Ms. Mori, we left with no fanfare aside from that provided by the General and Madame at the airport gate. There were four of us departing on this unlikely trip—Bon, myself, the grizzled captain, and the affectless lieutenant—slung across the Pacific in a tubular, subsonic Boeing airliner. Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I’ve had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer. I was in a daze and terribly uncomfortable, sharing my seat as I was with the crapulent major on one side and Sonny on the other. It was only my seventh time on a jet airplane. I had flown to and from America for college, then flew with Bon from Saigon to Guam and Guam to California, followed by my round trip to the Philippines, and now this. My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative? I would leave the anti-American negativity and pessimism to Bon, who had never assimilated and was relieved to go. It’s like I’ve been hiding in someone else’s house, he said somewhere over the Pacific. He was sitting across the aisle from me. The Japanese stewardesses were serving tempura and tonkatsu, which tasted better than the last word the General had forced into my mouth at the departure gate. In between the walls, Bon said, listening to other people live, coming out only at night. I can breathe now. We’re going back where everyone looks like us. Like you, I said. I don’t look like everyone there. Bon sighed. Stop bitching and moaning, he said, filling my teacup with the whiskey the General had given him at the gate. Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking. So I’ll just shup up then, I said. Yes, just shut up, he said. All right, then, I’ll shut up, I said. Jesus Christ, he said.

  After a sleepless twenty-hour trek that involved changing planes in Tokyo, we arrived in Bangkok. I was exhausted, not having been able to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw either the crapulent major’s face or Sonny’s, which I could not bear to look at for long. Thus it was not surprising that when I picked up my rucksack from the baggage carousel, I found it to be heavier than I remembered, loaded as it was now with guilt, dread, and anxiety. The overstuffed rucksack was my only piece of luggage, for before leaving our apartment, we had given the key to the Reverend R-r-r-r-amon and told him to sell our things and keep the money for his Church of Everlasting Prophets. All my belongings now fit in the rucksack, my copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction in its false bottom, the book so well worn it had nearly split in two along its cracked spine. Everything else we needed would be provided in Thailand, the General said. Matters would be handled by the admiral in charge of the base camp and by Claude, who would be there in a guise familiar to him, working for a nongovernmental organization that assisted refugees. He greeted us at the international gate dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and linen pants, looking the same as I had seen him last at Professor Hammer’s house, except for being deeply tanned. It’s great to see you guys, he said, shaking my hand and those of the others. Welcome to Bangkok. You guys ever been here? Didn’t think so. We’ve got one night and we’re painting the town red. My treat. He threw his arm around my shoulders and squeezed with genuine affection, leading me through the throbbing crowd and toward the exit. Perhaps it was only my state of mind, its consistency close to porridge, but every one of the natives we passed seemed to be looking at the two of us. I wondered if among them was one of Man’s agents. You look good, Claude said. You ready to do this thing?

  Of course, I said, all my dread and anxiety bubbling in a compartment somewhere behind my bowels. I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? I could hardly ask that question of Claude, who always seemed to be the master of his own fate, at least until the fall of Saigon. He squeezed my shoulder again. I’m proud of you, buddy. I just wanted you to know that. We both walked in silence for a moment, allowing this sentiment to circulate, and then he squeezed my shoulder again and said, I’m going to show you the best time of your life. I grinned and he grinned, the thing unsaid being that this might be the last best time of my life. His enthusiasm and concern touched me, his way of saying he loved me, or possibly his way of providing me with the equivalent of a doomed man’s last meal. He led us outside the terminal and into the seasonable late December weather, the best time of the year to visit the region. We loaded ourselves into a van, and Claude said, You don’t get over jet lag by going to a hotel and getting some sleep. I’m going to keep you awake until nighttime, and then tomorrow we’re setting out for the camp.

  The driver steered us onto a road jammed with vans, trucks, and motorbikes. We were surrounded by the honking, beeping, and roaring of an urban metropolis engorged with automotive metal, human flesh, and unspoken emotion. Remind you guys of home? said Claude. This is the closest you guys have been for years. Same-same like Saigon, the grizzled captain said. Same-same but different, said Claude. No war and no refugees. All that’s on the border, where you guys are going. Claude passed out cigarettes and we all lit up. First it was the Laotians running across the border. Now we have a lot of Hmong. Al
l very sad, but helping refugees does get us access to the countryside. The affectless lieutenant shook his head and said, Laos. Very evil communists there. Claude said, Is there any other kind? But Laos itself is the closest thing to paradise Indochina’s got. I spent time there during the war and it was incredible. I love those people. They’re the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth except when they want to kill you. When he exhaled smoke, the tiny fan mounted on the dashboard blew it back toward us. At some point, had Claude and other foreigners considered us to be the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth? Or had we always been a warlike, aggressive people? I suspected the latter.

  As the driver exited from the freeway, Claude nudged me and said, I heard about what you did. What I did? What did I do? When Claude said nothing and kept his steady gaze on me, I remembered the one thing that I had done that must be passed over in silence. Oh, yeah, I muttered. Don’t feel bad, said Claude. From what the General told me, that guy was asking for it. I can guarantee you he didn’t ask for it, I said. That’s not what I meant, said Claude. It’s just that I’ve seen plenty of his kind. Professional malcontents. Self-righteous masochists. They’re so unhappy with everything that they’re never going to be happy until they’re trussed for execution. And you know what his kind would say when he’s facing the firing squad? I told you so! The only thing different in your case is that the poor slob didn’t have time to think about it. If you say so, Claude, I said. I’m not saying so, he said. It’s in the book. He’s the guilt-ridden character.

  I could see the pages of the book that Claude was referring to, the interrogation manual we had pored over in his course, the book that went under the name KUBARK. It had definitions of several character types the interrogator was likely to meet, and unbidden, the paragraph about the guilt-ridden character rippled before my eyes.