Sympathizer

  By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities, of whom sober studies, anecdotal evidence, and random sampling indicate the existence of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands. Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI. His pants bulging with an inflationary roll of dollars and his adolescent brain swollen with the yellow fever that afflicts so many Western men who come to an Asian country, this American GI discovered to his surprise and delight that in this green-breasted world he was no longer Clark Kent but Superman, at least in regards to women. Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

  This trio of talented stars promised another kind of goodness altogether, the bad kind. They flirted shamelessly with me and teased Bon and the American husband with the walrus mustache, now awake. Both merely grimaced and made themselves as still and small as they could, quite aware of the grim silence of their wives. I, on the other hand, flirted happily in return, perfectly mindful that each of these demimondaines had a backstory capable of breaking my heart and, most likely, my bank account. Did I not have one of these same backstories? But performers perform at least partially to forget their sadness, a trait I am well acquainted with. In these situations it is better to flirt and play, allowing everyone the opportunity to pretend to be happy for so long that they might actually feel such happiness. And it was a pleasure just to look at them! Mimi was tall, with long straight hair and pink nail polish on all twenty digits, their tips as glossy as jelly beans. Her throaty voice with its mysterious Hue dialect compelled all my blood vessels to constrict, making me a touch light-headed. Ti Ti was fragile and petite, a fabulous beehive hairdo adding height. Her pale skin evoked eggshells, her eyelashes trembled with a hint of dew. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses. Phi Phi was the leader, her body’s curves reminding me of the dunes of Phan Thiet, where my mother had taken me for the one vacation of her life. While Mama covered herself from head to toe so she would not get any darker, I grubbed in the sunbaked sand ecstatically. That blissful memory of a ten-year-old’s warmth and happiness was aroused by Phi Phi’s fragrance, the same, nearly, or so I imagined, as from the one tiny vial of honey-colored perfume my mother owned, a present from my father with which she anointed herself once a year. So I fell in love with Phi Phi, a harmless enough emotion. I was wont to fall in love two or three times a year and was now well past due.

  As to how they had managed to infiltrate this airbase, when evacuations were meant for the rich, the powerful, and/or the connected, it was all because of Sarge. I imagined a slab of beefcake on two legs with a white marine’s cap perched on top. Sarge guards the embassy and just loves us girls, Phi Phi said. He’s a sweetheart, a doll, he didn’t forget us at all, just like he said he would never forget us. The other two nodded vigorously, Mimi cracking her gum and Ti Ti cracking her knuckles. Sarge got a bus and drove up and down Tu Do, rescuing as many of us girls as were around who wanted to leave. Then he got us on the airbase by telling the cops he was bringing us for a party with the poor boys here. The hard peach of my heart ripened and softened as I thought of their Sarge, this swell American who actually kept his promises, first name Ed and last name something none of the girls could pronounce. I asked them why they wanted to leave, and Mimi said because the communists were sure to imprison them as collaborators. They call us whores, she said. And they call Saigon the whore city, don’t they? Honey, I can connect the dots. Plus, Ti Ti said, even if we’re not tossed in jail, we couldn’t do our work. You can’t buy or sell anything in a communist country, right? Not for a profit, anyway, and darling, I’m not letting anyone eat this mango for free, communism or no communism. At this all three hooted and clapped. They were as ribald as Russian sailors on shore leave, but they also had a firm grasp of the theory of exchange value. What indeed would happen to girls like them once the revolution was victorious? To this matter I confess that I had not devoted much thought.

  Their spirited élan made the time fly by as quickly as the C-130s flashing overhead, but even they and I got tired as the hours progressed and our numbers were not called. The marine with the bullhorn would mumble like a throat cancer victim with a mechanical larynx, and an exhausted company of evacuees would gather their pitiful belongings and stumble for the buses that would deliver them to the tarmac. Ten o’clock passed, then eleven. I lay down and could not sleep, even though I was in what soldiers, with their usual wit, called a thousand-star hotel. All I need do was look up to the galaxy to remind myself of my good luck. I squatted and smoked another cigarette with Bon. I lay down and again could not sleep, bothered by the heat. At midnight, I took a walk around the compound and poked my head in the toilets. This was a bad idea. They had been meant to handle only the normal flow of a few dozen office workers and rear-echelon military types, not the hot waste of thousands of evacuees. The scene at the swimming pool was no better. For all the years of its existence, the swimming pool was an American-only area, with passes for the whites of other countries and for the Indonesians, Iranians, Hungarians, and Poles of the International Committee of Control and Supervision. Our country was overrun by acronyms, with the ICCS otherwise known as “I Can’t Control Shit,” its role to oversee the cease-fire between north and south after the American armed forces strategically relocated. It was a smashingly successful cease-fire, for in the last two years only 150,000 soldiers had died, in addition to the requisite number of civilians. Imagine how many would have died without a truce! Perhaps the evacuees resented the exclusion of locals from this pool, but more likely they were just desperate when they turned it into a urinal. I joined the tinkling line standing at the pool’s edge, then returned to the tennis courts. Bon and Linh dozed with their hands cupping their chins, Duc the only one getting any sleep at all in his mother’s lap. I squatted, I lay down, I smoked a cigarette, and so on until, at nearly four in the morning, our number was at last called and I bid farewell to the girls, who pouted and promised we would see each other again on Guam.

  We marched forth from the tennis court toward the parking lot, where a pair of buses waited to take on more than our group of ninety-two evacuees. The crowd was around two hundred, and when the General asked me who these other people were, I asked the nearest marine. He shrugged. Y’all ain’t too big, so we puttin’ two of you on for every one of us. Part of me was irritated as I boarded the bus after my unhappy General, while part of me reasoned that we were used to such treatment. After all, we treated each other in the same way, cramming our motorbikes, buses, trucks, elevators, and helicopters with suicidal loads of human cargo, disregarding all regulations and manufacturer recommendations. Was it any surprise that other people thought we were happy with conditions to which we were merely resigned? They wouldn’t treat an American general this way, the General complained, pressed against me in the tight confines. No, sir, th
ey wouldn’t, I said, and it was most likely true. Our bus was immediately fetid and hot from the passengers who had been simmering outdoors all day and night, but it was only a short way to our parked C-130 Hercules. The plane was a garbage truck with wings attached, and like a garbage truck deposits were made from the rear, where its big flat cargo ramp dropped down to receive us. This maw led into a generous alimentary canal, its membrane illuminated by a ghostly green blackout light. Disembarked from the bus, the General stood to one side of the ramp and I joined him to watch as his family, his staff, their dependents, and a hundred people we did not know climbed aboard, waved on by a loadmaster standing on the ramp. Come on, don’t be shy, he said to Madame, his head encased in a helmet the size and shape of a basketball. Nut to butt, lady. Nut to butt.

  Madame was too puzzled to be shocked. Her forehead wrinkled as she passed with her children, attempting to translate the loadmaster’s mindless refrain. Then I spotted a man coming to the ramp doing his best to avoid eye contact, a blue Pan Am travel bag clutched to his incurvate chest. I had seen him a few days prior, at his house in District Three. A mid-ranking apparatchik in the Ministry of the Interior, he was neither too tall nor too short, too thin nor too wide, too pale nor too dark, too smart nor too dumb. Some species of sub-undersecretary, he probably had neither dreams nor nightmares, his own interior as hollow as his office. I had thought of the sub-undersecretary a few times in the days since our meeting and could not recall his elusive face, but I recognized him now as he ascended the ramp. When I clapped my hand on his shoulder, he twitched and finally turned his Chihuahua eyes toward me, pretending not to have seen me. What a coincidence! I said. I didn’t expect to see you on this flight. General, our seats would not have been possible without the help of this kind gentleman. The General nodded stiffly, baring his teeth just enough to indicate that he should never be expected to reciprocate. My pleasure, the sub-­undersecretary whispered, slight frame quivering and wife tugging at his arm. If looks could emasculate, she would have walked off with my sac in her purse. After the crowd pushed them by, the General glanced at me and said, Was it a pleasure? Of a sort, I said.

  When all the passengers had boarded, the General motioned for me to go before him. He was the last to walk up the ramp into a cargo hold with no seats. Adults squatted on the floor or sat on bags, children perched on their knees. Lucky passengers had a bulkhead berth where they could cling to a cargo strap. The contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged, everyone forced into the mandatory intimacy required of those less human than the ones leaving the country in reserved seating. Bon, Linh, and Duc were somewhere in the middle, as were Madame and her children. The ramp slowly rose and clamped shut, sealing us worms into our can. Along with the loadmaster, the General and I leaned against the ramp, our knees in the noses of the passengers before us. The quartet of turboprop engines turned over with a deafening racket, the vibrations rattling the ramp. As the plane grumbled its way along the tarmac, the whole population rocked back and forth with every motion, a congregation swaying to inaudible prayers. The acceleration pressed me backward while the woman in front of me braced her arm against my knees, her jaw pressed to the rucksack on my lap. As the heat in the plane climbed over forty degrees Celcius, so did the intensity of our odor. We exuded the stink of sweat, of unwashed clothing, and of anxiety, with the only succor being the breeze through the open door where a crewman stood in a rock guitarist’s wide-legged pose. Instead of a six-string electric guitar slung low across his hips, he carried an M16 with a twenty-round magazine. As we taxied along the runway, I caught glimpses of concrete revetments, giant cans sliced in half lengthwise, and a desolate row of incinerated warbirds, demolished jets blown up in a strafing run earlier this evening, wings plucked and scattered like those of abused flies. A hush blanketed the passengers, hypnotized by trepidation and anticipation. They were, no doubt, thinking what I was. Good-bye, Vietnam. Au revoir, Saigon—

  The explosion was deafening, the force of it launching the crewman onto the passengers, the last thing I saw for several moments as the flash of light through the open door washed the sight from my eyes. The General tumbled into me and I fell onto the bulkhead, then onto screaming bodies, hysterical civilians spraying my face with sour saliva. The tires of the plane squealed on the runway as it spun to the right, and when my sight returned a blaze of fire shone through the door. I feared nothing more than burning to death, nothing more than being pureed by a propeller, nothing more than being quartered by a Katyusha, which even sounded like the name of a demented Siberian scientist who had lost a few toes and a nose to frostbite. I had seen roasted remains before, in a desolate field outside of Hue, carbonized corpses fused into the metal of a downed Chinook, the fuel tanks having incinerated the three dozen occupants, their teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus; the flesh of their lips and faces burned off; the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair converted to ash, no longer recognizable as my countrymen or as human beings. I did not want to die that way; I did not want to die in any way, least of all in a long-range bombardment from the artillery of my communist comrades, launched from the suburbs they had captured outside Saigon. A hand squeezed my chest and reminded me I was still alive. Another clawed my ear as the howling people beneath me struggled to heave me off. Pushing back to try to right myself, I found my hand on someone’s oily head and myself pressed against the General. Another explosion somewhere on the runway heightened the frenzy. Men, women, and children caterwauled at an even higher pitch. All of a sudden the plane halted its gyrations at such an angle where the eye of the door did not look out onto fire but only onto the darkness, and a man screamed, We’re all going to die! The loadmaster, cursing inventively, began the lowering of the ramp, and when the refugees surged forward against the opening, they bore me backward with them. The only way to survive being trampled to death was to cover my head with my rucksack and roll down the ramp, knocking people down as I did so. Another rocket exploded on the runway a few hundred meters behind us, lighting up an acre of tarmac and revealing the nearest shelter to be a battered concrete divider fifty meters from the runway. Even after the explosion faded, the disturbed night was no longer dark. The plane’s starboard engines were aflame, two blazing torches spewing gusts of spark and smoke.

  I was on my hands and knees when Bon seized me by the elbow, dragging me with one hand and Linh with the other. She in turn carried a wailing Duc, her arm wrapped around his chest. A meteorite shower of rockets and artillery shells was falling on the runways, an apocalyptic light show that revealed the evacuees dashing for the concrete divider, stumbling and tripping along the way, suitcases forgotten, the thundering prop wash from the two remaining engines blowing little children off their feet and staggering adults. Those who had reached the divider kept their whimpering heads below the concrete, and when something whizzed overhead—a fragment or a bullet—I fell to the earth and began crawling. Bon did likewise with Linh, her face tense but determined. By the time we fumbled our way to an unoccupied space at the divider, the crew had turned off the engines. The relief from the noise only made audible that someone was shooting at us. Bullets zipped overhead or ricocheted off the concrete, the gunners zeroing in on the bonfire of the burning plane. Our guys, Bon said, knees drawn up to his chest and one arm thrown around Duc, huddled between him and Linh. They’re pissed. They want a seat out of here. No way, I said, that’s NVA, they’ve taken the perimeter, even though I thought there was a fairly good chance it was our own men venting their frustrations. Then the plane’s gas tanks blew, the fireball illuminating a vast stretch of the airfield, and when I turned my face away from the bonfire I found that I was next to the sub-undersecretary, civil servant unextraordinaire, his face nearly pressed against my back and the message in his Chihuahua eyes as clear as the title on a cinema marquee. Like the communist agent and the lieutenant at the gate, he would have been happy to see me dead.

  I de
served his hatred. After all, I had denied him a considerable fortune as a result of my unannounced visit to his house, the address procured for me by the louche major. It is true I have some visas, the sub-undersecretary had said as we sat in his living room. I and some colleagues are making them available in the interests of justice. Isn’t it unjust that only the most privileged or fortunate have the opportunity to escape? I made some sympathetic noises. If there was true justice, he went on, everyone would leave who needed to. That is clearly not the case. But this puts someone like me in rather difficult circumstances. Why should I be the judge of who gets to leave and who does not? I am, after all, merely a glorified secretary. If you were in my situation, Captain, what would you do?