A long silence ensued. I heard only the shuffling of paper and the rasp of his tortured breathing. He was sucking hard to ensure the passage of even a small amount of air. Then he said, Yes, I am your friend, brother, comrade, all these things until I die. As your friend, brother, comrade, I warned you, didn’t I? I could not have been any clearer. I was not the only one reading your messages, nor could I send you a message without someone looking over my shoulder. Everyone has someone looking over his shoulder here. And yet you insisted on returning, you fool.
Bon was going to get himself killed, I had to come back to protect him.
And you were going to get yourself killed, too, the voice said. What kind of plan is that? Where would you two be if I was not here? We are the Three Musketeers, aren’t we? Or perhaps now we are the Three Stooges. No one volunteers for this camp, but when I realized you would be returning I demanded to be the commissar and to have the two of you sent here. Do you know who they put in this camp? The ones who chose to make a last stand, who continued to fight a guerrilla war, who will not recant or confess with proper contrition. Bon has already demanded twice to be shot by firing squad. The commandant would gladly have done it if not for me. As for you, your chances of survival would be doubtful without my protection.
You call this protection?
If it weren’t for me, you would likely be dead already. I am a commissar but above me are more commissars, reading your messages, following your progress. They dictate your reeducation. All I can do is take charge of it and persuade the commandant that my method will work. The commandant would have put you on a demining squad, and that would be the end of you. But I have gotten you the luxury of a year writing in an isolation cell. The other prisoners would kill for your privilege. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’ve done you a big favor, getting the commandant to keep you locked up. In his eyes, you are the most dangerous of all subversives, but I’ve convinced him that the revolution is better off curing you than killing you.
Me? Haven’t I proven myself a true revolutionary? Haven’t I sacrificed decades of my life in the cause of liberating our country? You of all people should know that!
It is not me who needs convincing. It is the commandant. You do not write in any way a man like him can understand. You claim to be a revolutionary, but your story betrays you, or rather, you betray yourself. Why, you stubborn ass, do you insist on writing this way, when you must know that the likes of you threaten the commandants of the world . . . The foot nudged me awake. I had fallen asleep for one delicious instance, as if I had been crawling through a desert and tasted a tear. Stay awake, the voice said. Your life depends on it.
You’re going to kill me if you won’t let me sleep, I said.
I am going to keep you awake until you understand, the voice said.
I understand nothing!
Then you have understood almost everything, the voice said. He chuckled and it sounded almost like my old schoolmate. Isn’t it funny how we find ourselves here, my friend? You came to save Bon’s life and I came to save both your lives. Let us hope my plot works out better than yours. But truth be told, it wasn’t purely out of friendship that I petitioned to be the commissar here. You have seen my face, or rather, my lack of one. Can you imagine my wife and children seeing this? The voice cracked. Can you imagine their horror? Can you imagine mine every time I look in the mirror? Although, to be honest, I have not looked at a mirror for years now.
I wept, thinking of him exiled from them. His wife was a revolutionary, too, a girl from our sister school of such integrity and simple beauty that I would have fallen in love with her if he hadn’t first. His boy and girl must be now at least seven and eight, little angels whose only fault was that they sometimes fought with each other. They would never look with fear on your . . . your condition, I said. You only imagine what they see through how you see yourself.
You know nothing! he shouted. Silence ensued again, interrupted only by the rasp of his breathing. I could imagine the scars of his lips, the scars in his throat, but all I wanted was to sleep . . . His foot nudged me. I apologize for losing my temper, the voice said, softly. My friend, you cannot know what I feel. You only think you can. But can you know what it is like to be so horrible that your own children cry when they see you, when your wife flinches at your touch, when your own friend does not recognize you? Bon has seen me this last year and not known who I am. True, he sits at the back of the meeting hall and only sees me from afar. I have not called him in to let him know who I am, because such knowledge would certainly do him no good and probably do him great harm. Nevertheless—nevertheless I dream that he will recognize me despite myself, even if, in recognizing me, he would only want to kill me. Can you imagine the pain of losing my friendship with him? Perhaps you can. But can you actually know the pain of napalm burning the skin off your face and your body? How can you?
Then tell me, I cried. I want to know what happened to you!
Silence ensued, for how long I do not know, until the foot nudged me again and I realized I had missed the first part of his story. I was still wearing my uniform, said the voice. The sense of doom was thick among my unit, panic in the eyes of the officers and the men. With the liberation only hours away, I hid my joy and excitement but not my worry for my family, even though they should be safe. My wife was at home with the children, one of our couriers close by to ensure their safety. When the tanks of the liberation army approached our bridge and my commanding officer ordered us to stand firm, I worried for myself as well. I didn’t want our liberators to shoot me on the last day of the war, and my mind was calculating how to avoid such a fate when someone said, Here’s the air force at last. One of our planes was overhead, flying high to avoid antiaircraft fire, but also flying far too high for a bombing run. Get closer, someone shouted. How’s he going to hit anything flying that high? The voice chuckled. How indeed? When the pilot dropped his bombs, the sense of dread possessing my fellow officers touched me, for I could see that the bombs, instead of falling toward the tanks, were falling toward us, in slow motion. The bombs fell faster than our eyesight told us, and though we ran, we did not get far. A cloud of napalm engulfed us, and I suppose I was lucky. I ran faster than the others and the napalm only licked me. It hurt. Oh, how much it hurt! But what can I tell you besides the fact that being on fire feels like being on fire? What can I tell you about the pain except that it was the most horrendous pain I have ever felt? The only way for me to show you how much it hurt, my friend, is for me to burn you myself, and that I will never do.
I, too, had come close to death on the tarmac of the Saigon airport, and again on the set of the Movie, but neither experience was the same as being burned. At worst I had been lightly scorched. I tried to imagine that multiplied by ten thousand, by a napalm that was the very light of Western civilization, having been invented at Harvard, or so I had learned in Claude’s class. But I could not. All I could feel was my desire for sleep as my self dissolved, leaving only my melting mind. But even in this buttery condition, my mind understood that this was not the time to talk about me. I can’t imagine, I said. Not at all.
It was a miracle that I lived. I am a living miracle! A human being turned inside out. I should be dead but for my dear wife, who searched for me when I did not come home. She found me dying in an army hospital, a low-priority case. When she notified the powers that be, they ordered the best surgeons remaining in Saigon to operate on me. I was saved! But for what? The pain of being burned was hardly less than the pain of having no skin and no face. I was on fire every day for months. When my medication wears off, I still burn. Excruciating is the right word, but it cannot convey the feeling it describes.
I think I know what excruciation feels like.
You are only beginning to know.
You don’t have to do this!
Then you do not yet understand. Certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciatio
n. I want you to know what it is that I knew and still know. I would have spared you that knowledge if you had not come back. But you have come back, and the commandant is watching. Left by yourself, you would not survive under his care. You frighten him. You are nothing but a shadow standing at the mouth of his cave, some strange creature that sees things from two sides. People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity. My task is to prove that you do not need to be purged, that you can be released. I have constructed this examination room exactly for this purpose.
You don’t have to do this, I muttered.
But I do! What’s being done to you is for your own good. The commandant would break you the only way he knows how, through your body. The only way to save you was to promise the commandant that I would test new methods of examination that would not leave a mark. This is why we have not beat you even once.
I should be thankful?
Yes, you should. But now it is time for the final revision. The commandant will accept no less. You must give him more than what you have.
I have nothing left to confess!
There is always something. That is confession’s nature. We can never stop confessing because we are imperfect. Even the commandant and I must criticize ourselves to each other, as the Party has intended. The military commandant and the political commissar are the living embodiment of dialectical materialism. We are the thesis and the antithesis from which comes the more powerful synthesis, the truly revolutionary consciousness.
If you already know what I forgot to confess, then tell me!
The voice chuckled again. I heard the shuffling of papers. Let me quote from your manuscript, the voice said. “The communist agent with the papier-mâché evidence of her espionage crammed into her mouth, our sour names literally on the tip of her tongue.” You mention her four more times in your confession. We learn that you pulled this list from her mouth and that she looked at you with mortal hatred, but we don’t learn her fate. You must tell us what you did to her. We demand to know!
I saw her face again, her dark peasant skin and broad, flat nose, so similar to those broad, flat noses of the doctors surrounding her in the movie theater. But, I said, I did nothing to her.
Nothing! Do you think her fate is the thing you have forgotten that you have forgotten? But how is her tragedy possible to forget? Her fate is so clear. Was there ever any fate for her that could differ from what a reader might imagine, seeing her in your confession?
But I did nothing to her!
Exactly! Don’t you see how everything in need of confession is already known? You indeed did nothing. That is the crime that you must acknowledge and to which you must confess. Do you agree?
Perhaps. My voice was faint. His foot nudged me again. Would he let me sleep if I said yes?
It is time for me to rest, my friend. I can feel the pain again. The pain never goes away. Do you know how I tolerate it? Morphine. The voice chuckled. But that wonder drug only numbs the body and the brain. What about my mind? I’ve discovered that the only way to manage pain is to imagine someone else’s greater pain, a suffering that diminishes your own. So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? “For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.” When this human being lost his face, his skin, and his family, this human being imagined you, my friend. You had lost your country and I was the one who exiled you. I felt deeply for you, the terrible loss only hinted at in your cryptic messages. But now you have returned, and I can no longer imagine your suffering to be greater than mine.
I’m suffering now, I said. Please, just let me go to sleep.
We’re revolutionaries, my friend. Suffering made us. Suffering for the people is what we chose because we sympathized so much with their suffering.
I know all this, I said.
Then listen to me. The chair scraped and his voice, already high above me, rose even higher. Please understand. I do this to you because I am your friend and your brother. Only without the comfort of sleep will you fully understand the horrors of history. I tell you this as someone who has slept very little since what has happened to me. Believe me when I say that I know how you feel, and that this has to be done.
I was already afraid, but his prescription of my treatment magnified my fear even more. Somebody must have something done to him! Was I that somebody? No! That cannot be true, or so I wanted to tell him, but my tongue refused to obey me. I was only mistaken to be that somebody, because I was, I told him, or thought I did, a nobody. I am a lie, a keeper, a book. No! I am a fly, a creeper, a gook. No! I am—I am—I am—
The chair scraped again and I smelled the distinct, gamy odor of the baby-faced guard. A foot nudged me and I trembled. Please, Comrade, I said. Just let me sleep. The baby-faced guard snorted, nudged me once more with his horny foot, and said, I’m not your comrade.
Chapter 21
The prisoner had never known that he needed a respite from history, he who had committed his adult life to its hot pursuit. His friend Man had introduced him to the science of history in the study group, its chosen books written in scarlet letters. If one understood history’s laws, then one could control history’s chronology, wresting it away from capitalism, already intent on monopolizing time. We wake, work, eat, and sleep according to what the landlord, the owner, the banker, the politician, and the schoolmaster command, Man had said. We accept that our time belongs to them, when in truth our time belongs to us. Awaken, peasants, workers, colonized! Awaken, invisible ones! Stir from your zones of occult instability and steal the gold watch of time from the paper tigers, running dogs, and fat cats of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism! If you know how to steal it, time is on your side, and numbers are, too. There are millions of you and only thousands of them, the colonizers, compradors, and capitalists who have persuaded the wretched of the earth that capitalist history is inevitable. We, the vanguard, must convince the dark peoples and subterranean classes that communist history is inevitable! The exhaustion of the exploited will inevitably lead them to revolt, but it is our vanguard that speeds up the time toward that uprising, resets the clock of history and rings the alarm clock of revolution. Ticktock—ticktock—ticktock—
Fixed on his mattress, the prisoner—no, the pupil—understood that this was the study group’s final session. To be a revolutionary subject he must be a historical subject who remembered all, which he could do so only by being fully awake, even if being fully awake would, eventually, kill him. And yet if he could but sleep, he would understand better! He writhed, he wriggled, he wrestled with himself in his failed bid for sleep, and this may have gone on for hours, or minutes, or seconds, when, all of a sudden, his hood was removed, followed by his gag, allowing him to gasp and suck in air. His captor’s rough hands plucked away his muffs and earplugs and, lastly, untied the blindfold chafing against his skin. Light! He could see, but just as quickly he had to shut his eyes. Suspended over him were dozens—no, hundreds of lightbulbs, planted in the ceiling and blinding him with their collective wattage, their glare radiating through the red filter of his eyelids. A foot pushed against his temple and the baby-faced guard said, No sleeping, you. He opened his eyes to the glowing hot mass of bulbs arranged in an orderly grid, their intense light revealing an examination room whose walls and ceiling were plastered in white. The floor was cement painted white, and even the iron door was painted white, all in a chamber roughly three meters by five. The baby-faced guard in his yellow uniform stood at attention in the corner, but the three others in the room stood at the edges of his mattress, one to either side and another at his feet. They were dressed in white lab coats and sea-green medical scrubs, hands behind their backs. Surgical masks and stainless steel goggles hid their faces, all six orbital lenses focused on him, who was now clearly not only prisoner and pupil but also patient.
Q. Who are you?
The man to his left asked the question. Didn’t they know who he was by now? He was the man with a plan, the spy with an eye, the mole in the hole, but his tongue had inflated itself to fill his entire mouth. Please, he wanted to say, let me close my eyes. Then I’ll tell you who I am. The answer is on the tip of my tongue—I am the gook being cooked. And if you say I am only half a gook? Well, in the words of that blond-haired major tasked with counting the communist dead after the battle for Ben Tre, confronted with the mathematical problem of a corpse whose remains included only his head, chest, and arms: half a gook is still a gook. And since the only good gook is a dead gook, as the American soldiers liked to say, it must be that this patient was one bad gook.
Q. What are you?
This came from the man to his right in the commandant’s voice. On hearing this voice, the patient lunged against his ropes until they burned his flesh, the question inciting a red flare of silent rage. I know what you’re thinking! You think I’m a traitor! A counterrevolutionary! A bastard who belongs nowhere, not to be trusted by anyone! The rage subsided just as suddenly into despair, and he wept. Would his sacrifices never be honored? Would no one ever understand him? Would he always be alone? Why must he be the man to whom things are done?
Q. What is your name?
It was the man at the end of the mattress, speaking in the commissar’s voice. An easy question, or so he thought. He opened his mouth, but when his tongue would not move, he shrank in fright. Had he forgotten his name? No, impossible! He had given himself his American name. As for his native name, his mother, the only one who understood him, had given it to him, his father no help, his father who never called him son or by his name, even in class simply calling him you. No, he could never forget his name, and when at last it came to him, he freed his tongue from its gummy bed and said it aloud.
The commissar said, He can’t even get his name right. Doctor, I think he needs the serum, to which the man on the patient’s left said, Very well, then. The doctor brought his hands from behind his back, gloved to the forearms in white rubber, one hand with an ampule the size of a rifle cartridge, the other with a needle. With a smooth stroke, the doctor drew a clear liquid from the ampule into the needle, then crouched by the patient’s side. When he shuddered and twitched, the doctor said, One way or another I’ll inject you, and if you move, it will be worse for you. The patient stopped thrashing and the prick in the crook of the elbow was almost a welcome relief, another kind of feeling than the hallucinatory urge for sleep. Almost, but not quite. Please, he said, turn off the lights.