The Sympathizer

  This insight was not so far off from Mr. Franklin’s. That sly old sybarite was well aware of the importance of the erotic to the political, wooing the ladies as much as the politicians in his bid for French assistance to the American Revolution. Therefore the gist of the First American’s letter to his young friend was correct: we should all have older mistresses. This is not as sexist as it sounds, for the implication was that older women should also bed younger studs. And if subtlety was not always present in the Old Goat’s missive, the randy truth was. Thus our fine man’s second point, namely that the gravity of age worked its way from the top downward with the years. This commenced with the facial features, then crept south to the neck, the breasts, the tummy, etc., so that an older mistress was plump and juicy where it counted long after her visage was dry and haggard, in which case one could simply put a basket on her head.

  But there was no such need in Ms. Mori’s case, as her features were pleasantly ageless. The only thing that could have made me happier was a companion for Bon, who, so far as I knew, was also practicing his solo stroke. Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pederastic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks. Popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks carrying on with women, girls, boys, and each other? Hardly ever discussed! Not that there was anything wrong with carrying on—it’s hypocrisy that stinks, not sex. But the Church torturing, murdering, crusading against, or infecting with disease millions of people in the name of our Lord the Savior, from Arabia to the Americas? Acknowledged with useless, pious regret, if even that.

  As for me, it was the reverse. Ever since my fevered adolescence I had enjoyed myself with athletic diligence, using the same hand with which I crossed myself in mock prayer. This seed of sexual rebellion one day matured into my political revolution, disregarding all my father’s sermons about how onanism inevitably led to blindness, hairy palms, and impotence (he forgot to mention subversion). If I was going to Hell, so be it! Having made my peace with sinning against myself, sometimes on an hourly basis, it was only due time before I sinned with others. So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions. Oh, you poor, innocent, mute squid! You were the length of my hand, and when stripped of head, tentacles, and guts possessed the comely shape of a condom, not that I knew what that was then. Inside, you had the smooth, viscous consistency of what I imagined to be a vagina, not that I had ever seen such a marvelous thing besides those exhibited by the toddlers and infants wandering around totally naked or naked from the waist down in my town’s lanes and yards. This sight scandalized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were both in question. But I digress! Back to you, soon-to-be-ravished squid: when I poked my index and then middle finger inside your tight orifice, just out of curiosity, the suction was such that my restless imagination could not help but make the connection with the verboten female body part that had obsessed me for the past few months. Without bidding, and utterly beyond my control, my maniacal manhood leaped to attention, luring me forward to you, inviting, bewitching, come-hither squid! Although my mother would return soon from her errand, and while at any moment a neighbor might have walked by the lean-to of our kitchen and caught me with my cephalopodic bride, I nevertheless dropped my trousers. Hypnotized by my squid’s call and my erection’s response, I inserted the latter into the former, which was, unfortunately, a perfect fit. Unfortunate because from then onward no squid was safe from me, not to say that this diluted form of ­bestiality—after all, hapless squid, you were dead, though I now see how that raises other moral ­questions—not to say this transgression occurred often, since squid was a rare treat in our landlocked town. My father had given my mother the squid as a gift, as he himself ate well. Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven. These fans invited them to dinner, cleaned their chambers, cooked their food, and bribed them with gifts of various kinds, including delectable, expensive seafood not meant for the likes of a poor woman like my mother. While I felt no shame at all for my shuddering ejaculation, an enormous burden of guilt fell on me as soon as my senses returned, not because of any moral violation, but because I could hardly bear depriving my mother of even a morsel of squid. We had only a half dozen, and she would notice one missing. What to do? What to do? A plan instantly came to my devious mind as I stood with the befuddled, deflowered squid in hand, my blasphemy leaking from its molested vulva. First, rinse the evidence of crime from the inert, abused squid. Second, cut shallow scars onto the skin to identify the victim squid. Then wait for dinner. My innocent mother returned to our miserable hut, stuffed the squid with ground pork, bean thread noodle, diced mushroom, and chopped ginger, then fried and served them with a ginger-lime dipping sauce. There on the plate reclined my beloved, forlorn odalisque, marked by my hand, and when my mother said to help myself I seized it instantly with my chopsticks to forestall any chance of my mother doing so. I paused, my mother’s expectant, loving eyes upon me, and then I dipped the squid into the ginger-lime sauce and took the first bite. Well? she said. De-de-delicious, I stammered. Good, but you should chew it rather than swallow it whole, son. Take your time. It will taste better that way. Yes, Mama, I said. And, bravely smiling, this obedient son slowly chewed and savored the rest of his defiled squid, its salty flavor mixed with his mother’s sweet love.

  Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.” Still, while I was more lover than fighter, my political choices and police service eventually did force me to cultivate a side of myself I had used only once in my childhood, the violent side. Even as a secret policeman, however, I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me. Only when unfavorable conditions squeezed me into situations from which my cleverness could not extract me did I permit this violence to happen. These situations were so unpleasant that the memories of those whom I had seen interrogated continued to hijack me with fanatic persistence: the wiry Montagnard with a wire twisted around his neck and a twisted grimace on his face; the stubborn terrorist in his white room and with his purple face, impervious to everything except the one thing; 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. These captured subversives had only one destination, but there were many unpleasant side roads to get there. When I arrived at the liquor store for the grand opening, I shared with these prisoners the dread certainty that snickered beneath the card tables of retirement homes. Someone was going to die. Perhaps me.

  The liquor store was on the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard, far from the camera-popping glamour of the Egyptian and Chinese theaters where the latest movies premiered. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and Bon’s other function, besides clerking, was to intimidate any would-be robbers and shoplifters. He nodded at me impassively from the cash register, standing before a wall with shelves displaying primo brands, theft-worthy pint bottles, and, in a discreet corner, men’s magazines with airbrushe
d Lolitas on their covers. Claude’s in the storeroom with the General, Bon said. The storeroom was in the back, abuzz with overhead fluorescent lights, smelling of disinfectant and old cardboard. Claude rose from his vinyl chair and we embraced. He was heavier by a few pounds but otherwise unchanged, even wearing a rumpled sport jacket he used on occasion in Saigon.

  Have a seat, the General said from behind his desk. The vinyl chairs squeaked obscenely when we moved. Cartons and crates hemmed us in on three sides. The General’s desk was cluttered with a rotary-dial phone heavy enough for self-defense, a stamp pad bleeding red ink, a receipt book with a blue sheet of carbon paper tucked between the pages, and a desk lamp with a broken neck, its head refusing to stay raised. When the General opened his desk drawer, my heart choked. Here it was! The moment when the rat would get a hammer to the head, a knife to the neck, a bullet in the temple, or possibly all of the above just for the fun of it. At least it would be quick, relatively speaking. Back in the European Dark Ages, according to the interrogation course that Claude had taught to the secret policemen in Saigon, I would have been drawn and quartered by horses, my head stuck on a pole for all to see. One royal humorist flayed his enemy alive and then stuffed the skin with straw, mounted it on a horse, and paraded it around town. What a laugh! I stopped breathing and waited for the General to pull out the pistol with which he was going to remove my brains in an unsurgical fashion, but all he extracted was a bottle of scotch and a pack of cigarettes.

  Well, said Claude, I wish we were reuniting in better circumstances, gentlemen. I heard you had a hell of a time getting out of Dodge. That, the General said, is putting it mildly. And yourself? I said. I bet you got out on the last helicopter.

  Let’s not be too dramatic, Claude said. He accepted the General’s offer of a cigarette and a tumbler of scotch. I got out a few hours earlier on the ambassador’s helicopter. He sighed. I’m never going to forget that day. We waited too damn long to get our act together. You were the last ones out on airplanes. The marines flew in on helicopters to get the rest of the people from the airport and the embassy. Air America was flying rescue choppers, too, but the problem was that everyone in town knew about our supposedly secret helipads. Turns out that we’d enlisted little Vietnamese ladies to paint those helipad numbers on the roofs. Smart, huh? Come the moment of truth, all those buildings were surrounded. The ones who were supposed to get to the helicopters couldn’t get to them. Same story at the airport, no way in. The docks, totally impassable. Even the buses going to the embassy couldn’t get in, since the embassy was mobbed by thousands. They were waving all kinds of paper. Marriage certificates, employment contracts, letters, even US passports. They were screaming. I know So-and-So, So-and-So can vouch for me, I’m married to a US citizen. None of that counted. The marines were on the wall and pounding anybody who tried to come up. You had to get close enough to give a marine a thousand dollars before he’d haul you up. We’d go up to the wall or to the gate every now and then and look for the people who worked for us and we’d point them out. If they got close, the marines yanked them up or opened the gates a bit to let just that person in. But sometimes we’d see people we knew in the middle of the crowd or on the fringes, and we’d wave at them to get to the wall, but they couldn’t. All those Vietnamese in front weren’t letting any Vietnamese in back get ahead. So we’d look and wave, and they’d look and wave, and then after a while we just looked away and left. Thank God I couldn’t hear them screaming, not over all that ruckus. I’d go back inside and have a drink, but it wasn’t any better. You should have heard the radio chatter. Help me, I’m a translator, we have seventy translators at this address, get us out. Help me, we have five hundred people at this compound, get us out. Help me, we have two hundred at logistics, get us out. Help me, we have a hundred at the CIA hotel, get us out. Guess what? None of those people got out. We’d told them to go to those places and wait for us. We had guys at those places and we called them and said, No one’s coming. Get yourselves out now and get to the embassy. Leave those people behind. Then there were the people outside the city. Agents all over the countryside were calling in. Help, I’m in Can Tho, the VC are closing in. Help, you left me in the U Minh Forest, what am I going to do, what about my family? Help me, get me out of here. They had no chance in hell. Even some of those in the embassy had no chance. We evacuated thousands, but when the last helicopter took off, there were still four hundred people waiting in the courtyard, all neatly arranged and waiting for helicopters we told them were still coming. None of them got out.

  Christ, I need another drink even to talk about this. Thank you, General. He rubbed his eyes. All I can say is, it was personal. After I left you at the airport, I went back to my villa to get some sleep. I’d told Kim to meet me at dawn. She was going to get her family. Six comes along, six fifteen, six thirty, seven. The chief calls me up and wants to know where I am. I put him off. Seven fifteen, seven thirty, eight. The chief calls me back and says, Get your ass down to the embassy now, every man on deck. The hell with the chief, that Hungarian bastard. I grab my guns and drive across town to find Kim. Forget the daytime curfew, everyone was out and running around, trying to find a way out. The suburbs were quieter, though. Life was normal. I even saw Kim’s neighbors breaking out the commie flag. The previous week those same people were flying your flag. I asked them where she was. They said they didn’t know where the Yankee whore was. I wanted to shoot them then and there, but everybody on the street had turned out to look at me. I sure couldn’t wait for the local Viet Cong to come kidnap me. I drove back to the villa. Ten o’clock. She wasn’t there. I couldn’t wait any longer. I sat in the car and I cried. I haven’t cried over a girl in thirty years, but hell, there you have it. Then I drove to the embassy and saw there was no way in. Like I said, thousands of people. I left the keys in the ignition just like you did, General, and I hope some communist son of a bitch is enjoying himself with my Bel Air. Then I fought my way through the crowd. Those Vietnamese who wouldn’t let their own fellow Vietnamese through, they made way for me. Sure, I pushed and shoved and screamed, and plenty of them pushed and shoved and screamed right back, but I got closer, even though the closer I got, the tougher it was. I had made eye contact with the marines on the wall, and I knew if I could just get close enough I’d be saved. I was sweating like a pig, my shirt was torn, and all those bodies were packed against me. The people in front of me couldn’t see I was an American and no one was turning around just because I was tapping them on the shoulder, so I yanked them by the hair, or pulled them by the ear, or grabbed them by the shirt collar to haul them out of my way. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I was too proud to scream at first, but it didn’t take long before I was screaming, too. Let me through, I’m an American, goddammit. I finally got myself to that wall, and when those marines reached down and grabbed my hand and pulled me up, I damn near cried again. Claude finished the last of his drink and banged the glass on the desk. I was never so ashamed in my life, but I was also never so goddamn glad to be an American, either.

  We sat in silence while the General poured us each another double.

  Here’s to you, Claude, I said, raising my glass to him. Congratulations.

  For what? he said, raising his own.

  Now you know what it feels like to be one of us.

  His laugh was short and bitter.

  I was thinking the exact same thing.

  The cue for the evacuation’s final phase was “White Christmas,” played on American Radio Service, but even this did not go according to plan. First, since the song was top secret information, meant only for the Americans and their allies, everyone in the city also knew what to listen for. Then what do you think happens? Claude said. The deejay can’t find the song. The Bing Crosby one. He’s tossing his booth looking for that tape, and of course it’s not there. Then what? said the General. He finds a version by Tennessee Ernie Ford and plays that. Who’s he? I said. How do I kno
w? At least the melody and lyrics were the same. So, I said, situation normal. Claude nodded. All fucked up. Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.

  This was the prayer many a general and politician said before they went to bed, but some snafus were more justifiable than others. Take the operation’s name, Frequent Wind, a snafu foreshadowing a snafu. I had brooded on it for a year, wondering if I could sue the US government for malpractice, or at least a criminal failure of the literary imagination. Who was the military mastermind who squeezed out Frequent Wind from between his tightly clenched buttocks? Didn’t it occur to anyone that Frequent Wind might bring to mind the Divine Wind that inspired the kamikaze, or, more likely for the ahistorical, juvenile set, the phenomenon of passing gas, which, as is well known, can lead to a chain reaction, hence the frequency? Or was I not giving the military mastermind enough credit for being a deadpan ironist, he having also possibly chosen “White Christmas” as a poke in the eye to all my countrymen who neither celebrated Christmas nor had ever seen a white one? Could not this unknown ironist foresee that all the bad air whipped up by American helicopters was the equivalent of a massive blast of gas in the faces of those left behind? Weighing stupidity and irony, I picked the latter, irony lending the Americans a last shred of dignity. It was the only thing salvageable from the tragedy that had befallen us, or that we had brought on ourselves, depending on one’s point of view. The problem with this tragedy is that it had not ended neatly, unlike a comedy. It still preoccupied us, the General most of all, who now turned to business.

  I am glad you are here, Claude. Your timing could not be more perfect.

  Claude shrugged. Timing’s one thing I’ve always been good at, General.

  We have a problem, as you warned me before we left.

  Which problem? There was more than one, as I recall.