The Sympathizer

  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 excruciation. 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 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. A
nd 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.

  The commissar said, That we cannot do. Don’t you see that you must see? The commandant snorted. He will never see, not with all the light in the world. He’s been underground too long. He’s fundamentally blind! Now, now, said the doctor, patting the patient’s arm. Men of science must never give up hope, least of all when operating on the mind. As we can neither see nor touch his mind, all we can do is help the patient see his own mind by keeping him awake, until he can observe himself as someone else. This is most crucial, for we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It’s as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can. This is the nature of our experiment, for which we need one more device. The doctor pointed to a brown leather satchel on the floor that the patient had not noticed but immediately recognized, a military field telephone, the sight of which made him tremble again. The Soviets provided the serum that will compel our patient to tell the truth, the doctor said. This other component is American. You see the look in our patient’s eyes? He remembers what he has seen in those interrogation rooms. But we will not be wiring him via nipple and scrotum to the battery terminals on the phone’s generator. Instead—the doctor reached into the satchel and extracted a black wire—we clip this to a toe. As for the hand crank, it generates too much electricity. We do not want pain. We do not torture. All we want is enough stimulus to keep him awake. Thus I have modified the electrical output and wired the phone to this. The doctor held up a wristwatch. Every time the second hand crosses twelve o’clock, a brief spark travels to the patient’s toe.

  The doctor untied the burlap sack of wadding from around the patient’s foot, and although the patient craned his neck to see the doctor’s contraption he could not elevate himself enough to observe the details. All he could see was the black wire running from toe to satchel, inside of which the doctor had replaced the wristwatch. Sixty seconds, gentlemen, said the doctor. Ticktock . . . the patient trembled, waiting for the call. The patient had seen how a subject receiving such a call answered it by screaming and flinging about. By the tenth or twentieth such call, the subject’s eyes took on the glassy sheen of a taxidermically prepared specimen in a diorama, living and yet dead, or vice versa, as the subject anticipated the crank’s next turn. Claude, who had taken the class to see such an interrogation, said, Any of you jokers laugh or get a hard-on, I yank you. This is serious business. The patient remembered being relieved when he was not asked to turn the crank. Watching the subject spasm, he had winced and wondered what the call felt like. Now here he was, sweating and shivering as the seconds ticked away until a burst of static electricity made him jump, not pained but startled. See? Perfectly harmless, said the doctor. Just keep switching the wire to different toes so he doesn’t get a burn from the wire’s clip.

  Thank you, Doctor, said the commissar. Now if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like some privacy with our patient. Take all the time you want, said the commandant, heading for the door. This patient’s mind is contaminated. It needs a thorough washing. After the exit of the commandant, the doctor, and the baby-faced guard—but not Sonny and the crapulent major, who observed the patient with great patience as they stood in one corner—the commissar sat down on a wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room besides the patient’s mattress. Please, the patient said, just let me rest. The commissar said nothing until the next burst of static electricity jarred the patient. Then he leaned forward and showed the patient a thin book heretofore hidden from him. We found this in your quarters at the General’s villa.

  Q. What is the title?

  A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, 1963.

  Q. What is KUBARK?

  A. A cryptonym for the CIA.

  Q. What is the CIA?

  A. The Central Intelligence
Agency of the USA.

  Q. What is the USA?

  A. The United States of America.

  You see that I hide nothing from you, the commissar said, leaning back. I have read your marginal notes, taken account of your underlined passages. Everything being done to you comes from this book. In other words, yours is an open-book exam. There are no surprises.

  Sleep . . .

  No. I am observing you to see if this serum is working. A gift from the KGB, although we both know what the great powers expect for their gifts. They have tested their techniques, their weapons, and their ideas on our small country. We have been the subjects of that experiment they call, with a straight face, the Cold War. What a joke, given how hot the war has been for us! Funny but not so funny, for you and I are together the butt of this joke. (I thought we were the butt of the joke, said Sonny. Hush, said the crapulent major. I want to hear this. It’s going to be rich!) As always, the commissar continued, we have appropriated their techniques and technology. These lightbulbs? Manufactured in the USA, and the generator that powers them as well, although the gasoline is a Soviet import.

  Please, turn off the lights, the patient said, sweating from the heat generated by the grid of bulbs. Hearing no response, he repeated himself, and when he still heard nothing, he realized that the commissar had left. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he thought he was asleep, until the electricity bit his toe. I’ve been subjected to these techniques myself at the Farm, Claude had told the class. They work even if you know what is being done to you. He was referring to the techniques in the mimeographed KUBARK manual now in the commissar’s hands, the required reading for the interrogation course. The patient, before he was a patient and when he was only a pupil, had read this book several times. He had memorized its plot, characters, and devices, and he understood the importance of isolation, sensory deprivation, joint interrogators, and penetration agents. He had mastered the Ivan Is a Dope technique, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing technique, the Alice in Wonderland technique, the All-Seeing Eye technique, the Nobody Loves You technique. In short, he knew this book inside and out, including its stress on an unpredictable routine. Thus it was no surprise when the baby-faced guard came in and reattached the wire to one of his fingers. While the baby-faced guard was rewrapping his foot, the patient mumbled something even he did not understand, to which the baby-faced guard said nothing at all. This baby-faced guard was the one who had shown the patient his tattoo, BORN IN THE NORTH TO DIE IN THE SOUTH, scripted in blue ink on his biceps. As he was in the last division to march on Saigon, however, the war was over by the time he arrived to liberate the city. But his tattoo might still be prophetic. He had nearly died already from the syphilis given to him by a prisoner’s visiting wife, who had paid her bribe with the only resource she had. Please, turn off the lights, the patient said. But the baby-faced guard was no longer tending to him. It was a teenage guard, delivering his food. Hadn’t he just eaten? He wasn’t hungry, but the teenage guard forced the rice gruel down his throat with a metal spoon. The schedule of his basic necessities must be disrupted, his feeding schedule irregular and unpredictable, exactly according to the book. Like a doctor studying a fatal disease that suddenly afflicts him, he knew everything that had happened and would happen to him, and yet it made no difference. He attempted to tell this to the teenage guard, who told him to shut up before kicking him in the ribs and leaving. The electric wire bit him again, only this time it was not clipped to his finger but to his ear. He shook his head but the wire would not release its jaws, nagging at him to stay awake. His mind was raw and chapped, as his mother’s nipples must have been after he fed on them. My hungry baby, she called him. Just a few hours old, you couldn’t even open your eyes and yet you knew exactly where to find my milk. And once you latched on, you wouldn’t let go! You demanded it every hour on the hour. That first soupçon of his mother’s milk must have been perfection, but he could not remember what it tasted like. All he knew was what it did not taste like: fear, the sharp, metallic tinge of a nine-volt battery rubbed on his tongue.