The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  And yet they’re off, they’re on their way, and again Louie is repeating to him, “‘It’s all right, Louie’—that’s what Mikey told me, and that’s what Kenny is going to tell you. What he was telling me, Les, is that it was okay, I could get on with my life.”

  “I can’t take it, Lou—turn around.”

  “Buddy, relax. We’re halfway there.”

  “Turn the fucking thing around!”

  “Les, you don’t know unless you go. You got to go,” said Louie kindly, “and you got to find out.”

  “I don’t want to find out!”

  “How about you take a little more of your meds? A little Ativan. A little Valium. A little extra won’t hurt. Give him some water, Chet.”

  Once they reached Pittsfield and Louie had parked across the way from the Ramada Inn, it wasn’t easy getting Les out of the van. “I’m not doin’ it,” he said, and so the others stood around outside smoking, letting Les have a little more time for the extra Ativan and Valium to kick in. From the street, Louie kept an eye on him. There were a lot of police cars around and a lot of buses. There was a ceremony going on at the Wall, you could hear somebody speaking over a microphone, some local politician, probably the fifteenth one to sound off that morning. “The people whose names are inscribed on this wall behind me are your relatives, friends, and neighbors. They are Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, white, native people—Americans all. They gave a pledge to defend and protect, and gave their lives to keep that pledge. There is no honor, no ceremony, that can fully express our gratitude and admiration. The following poem was left at this wall a few weeks ago in Ohio, and I’d like to share it with you. ‘We remember you, smiling, proud, strong / You told us not to worry / We remember those last hugs and kisses . . .’”

  And when that speech was over, there was another to come. “. . . but with this wall of names behind me, and as I look out into the crowd and see the faces of middle-aged men like me, some of them wearing medals and other remnants of a military uniform, and I see a slight sadness in their eyes—maybe that’s what’s left of the thousand-yard stare which we all picked up when we were just brother grunts, infantrymen, ten thousand miles away from home—when I see all this, I am somehow transported back thirty years. This traveling monument’s permanent namesake opened on the Mall in Washington on November 13, 1982. It took me roughly about two and a half years to get there. Looking back over that time, I know, like many Vietnam veterans, I stayed away on purpose, because of painful memories that I knew it would conjure up. And so on a Washington evening, when dusk was settling, I went over to the Wall by myself. I left my wife and children at the hotel—we were on our way back from Disney World—and visited, stood alone at its apex, close to where I’m standing right now. And the memories came—a whirlwind of emotions came. I remembered people I grew up with, played ball with, who are on this wall, right here from Pittsfield. I remembered my radio operator, Sal. We met in Vietnam. We played the where-you-from game. Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Whereabouts in Massachusetts? West Springfield he was from. I said I was from Pittsfield. And Sal died a month after I left. I came home in April, and I picked up a local newspaper, and I saw that Sal was not going to meet me in Pittsfield or Springfield for drinks. I remembered other men I served with . . .”

  And then there was a band—an army infantry band most likely—playing the “Battle Hymn of the Green Berets,” which led Louie to conclude that it was best to wait till the ceremony was completely over before getting Les out of the van. Louie had timed their arrival so they wouldn’t have to deal with the speeches or the emotional music, but the program had more than likely started late, and so they were still at it. Looking at his watch, though, seeing it was close to noon, he figured it must be near the end. And, yep—suddenly they were finishing up. The lone bugle playing taps. Just as well. Hard enough to hear taps standing out on the street amid all the empty buses and the cop cars, let alone to be right there, with all the weeping people, dealing with taps and the Wall. There was taps, agonizing taps, the last awful note of taps, and then the band was playing “God Bless America,” and Louie could hear the people at the Wall singing along—“From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam”—and a moment later it was over.

  Inside the van, Les was still shaking, but he didn’t appear to be looking behind him all the time and only occasionally was he looking over his head for “the things,” and so Louie climbed awkwardly back up inside and sat down next to him, knowing that the whole of Les’s life was now the dread of what he was about to find out, and so the thing to do was to get him there and get it done with.

  “We’re going to send Swift in advance, Les, to find Kenny for you. It’s a pretty long wall. Better than you having to go through all those names, Swift and the guys’ll go over and locate it in advance. The names are up there on panels in the order of time. They’re up there by time, from first guy to last guy. We got Kenny’s date, you gave us the date, so it won’t take too long now to find him.”

  “I ain’t do in’it.”

  When Swift came back to the van, he opened the door a crack and said to Louie, “We got Kenny. We found him.”

  “Okay, this is it, Lester. Suck it up. You’re going to walk over there. It’s around back of the inn. There are going to be other folks there doing the same thing we’re doing. They had an official little ceremony, but that’s finished and you don’t have to worry about it. No speeches. No bullshit. It’s just going to be kids and parents and grandparents and they are all going to be doing the same thing. They’re going to be laying wreaths of flowers. They’re going to be saying prayers. Mostly they’re going to be looking for names. They’re going to be talking among themselves like people do, Les. Some of them are going to be crying. That’s all that’s there. So you know just what’s there. You’re going to take your time but you’re coming with us.”

  It was unusually warm for November, and approaching the Wall they saw that a lot of the guys were in shirtsleeves and some of the women were wearing shorts. People wearing sunglasses in mid-November but otherwise the flowers, the people, the kids, the grandparents—it was exactly as Louie had described. And the Moving Wall was no surprise: he’d seen it in magazines, on T-shirts, got a glimpse on TV once of the real full-sized D.C. Wall before he quickly switched off the set. Stretched the entire length of the macadam parking lot were all those familiar joined panels, a perpendicular cemetery of dark upright slabs sloping off gradually at either end and stamped in white lettering with all the tightly packed names. The name of each of the dead was about a quarter of the length of a man’s little finger. That’s what it took to get them all in there, 58,209 people who no longer take walks or go to the movies but who manage to exist, for whatever it is worth, as inscriptions on a portable black aluminum wall supported behind by a frame of two-by-fours in a Massachusetts parking lot back of a Ramada Inn.

  The first time Swift had been to the Wall he couldn’t get out of the bus, and the others had to drag him off and keep dragging until they got him face to face with it, and afterward he had said, “You can hear the Wall crying.” The first time Chet had been to the Wall he’d begun to beat on it with his fists and to scream, “That shouldn’t be Billy’s name—no, Billy, no!—that there should be my name!” The first time Bobcat had been to the Wall he’d just put out his hand to touch it and then, as though the hand were frozen, could not pull it away—had what the VA doctor called some type of fit. The first time Louie had been to the Wall it didn’t take him long to figure out what the deal was and get to the point. “Okay, Mikey,” he’d said aloud, “here I am. I’m here,” and Mikey, speaking in his own voice, had said right back to him, “It’s all right, Lou. It’s okay.”

  Les knew all these stories of what could happen the first time, and now he is there for the first time, and he doesn’t feel a thing. Nothing happens. Everyone telling him it’s going to be better, you’re going to come to terms with it, each time you come back it’s goin
g to get better and better until we get you to Washington and you make a tracing at the big wall of Kenny’s name, and that, that is going to be the real spiritual healing—this enormous buildup, and nothing happens. Nothing. Swift had heard the Wall crying—Les doesn’t hear anything. Doesn’t feel anything, doesn’t hear anything, doesn’t even remember anything. It’s like when he saw his two kids dead. This huge lead-in, and nothing. Here he was so afraid he was going to feel too much and he feels nothing, and that is worse. It shows that despite everything, despite Louie and the trips to the Chinese restaurant and the meds and no drinking, he was right all along to believe he was dead. At the Chinese restaurant he felt something, and that temporarily tricked him. But now he knows for sure he’s dead because he can’t even call up Kenny’s memory. He used to be tortured by it, now he can’t be connected to it in any way.

  Because he’s a first-timer, the others are kind of hovering around. They wander off briefly, one at a time, to pay their respects to particular buddies, but there is always someone who stays with him to check him out, and when each guy comes back from being away, he puts an arm around Les and hugs him. They all believe they are right now more attuned to one another than they have ever been before, and they all believe, because Les has the requisite stunned look, that he is having the experience they all wanted him to have. They have no idea that when he turns his gaze up to one of the three American flags flying, along with the black POW/MIA flag, over the parking lot at half-mast, he is not thinking about Kenny or even about Veterans Day but thinking that they are flying all the flags at half-mast in Pittsfield because it has finally been established that Les Farley is dead. It’s official: altogether dead and not merely inside. He doesn’t tell this to the others. What’s the point? The truth is the truth. “Proud of you,” Louie whispers to him. “Knew you could do it. I knew this would happen.” Swift is saying to him, “If you ever want to talk about it . . .”

  A serenity has overcome him now that they all mistake for some therapeutic achievement. The Wall That Heals—that’s what the sign says that’s out front of the inn, and that is what it does. Finished with standing in front of Kenny’s name, they’re walking up and down with Les, the whole length of the Wall and back, all of them watching the folks searching for the names, letting Lester take it all in, letting him know that he is where he is doing what he is doing. “This is not a wall to climb, honey,” a woman says quietly to a small boy she’s gathered back from where he was peering over the low end. “What’s the name? What’s Steve’s last name?” an elderly man is asking his wife as he is combing through one of the panels, counting carefully down with a finger, row by row, from the top. “Right there,” they hear a woman say to a tiny tot who can barely walk; with one finger she is touching a name on the Wall. “Right there, sweetie. That’s Uncle Johnny.” And she crosses herself. “You sure that’s line twenty-eight?” a woman says to her husband. “I’m sure.” “Well, he’s got to be there. Panel four, line twenty-eight. I found him in Washington.” “Well, I don’t see him. Let me count again.” “That’s my cousin,” a woman is saying. “He opened a bottle of Coke over there, and it exploded. Booby-trapped. Nineteen years old. Behind the lines. He’s at peace, please God.” There is a veteran in an American Legion cap kneeling before one of the panels, helping out two black ladies dressed in their best church clothes. “What’s his name?” he asks the younger of the two. “Bates. James.” “Here he is,” the vet says. “There he is, Ma,” the younger woman says.

  Because the Wall is half the size of the Washington Wall, a lot of people are having to kneel down to search for the names and, for the older ones, that makes locating them especially hard. There are flowers wrapped in cellophane lying up against the Wall. There is a handwritten poem on a piece of paper that somebody has taped to the bottom of the Wall. Louie stoops to read the words: “Star light, star bright / First star I see tonight . . .” There are people with red eyes from crying. There are vets with a black Vietnam Vet cap like Louie’s, some of them with campaign ribbons pinned to the cap. There’s a chubby boy of about ten, his back turned stubbornly to the Wall, saying to a woman, “I don’t wanna read it.” There’s a heavily tattooed guy in a First Infantry Division T-shirt—“Big Red One,” the T-shirt says—who is clutching himself and wandering around in a daze, having terrible thoughts. Louie stops, takes hold of him, and gives him a hug. They all hug him. They even get Les to hug him. “Two of my high school friends are on there, killed within forty-eight hours of each other,” a fellow nearby is saying. “And both of them waked from the same funeral home. That was a sad day at Kingston High.” “He was the first one to go to Nam,” somebody else is saying, “and the only one of us to not come back. And you know what he’d want there under his name, at the Wall there? Just what he wanted in Nam. I’ll tell you exactly: a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pair of good boots, and pussy hairs baked into a brownie.”

  There is a group of four guys standing around talking, and when Louie hears them going at it, reminiscing, he stops to listen, and the others wait there with him. The four strangers are all gray-haired men—all of them now with stray gray hair or gray curls or, in one case, a gray ponytail poking out from back of the Vietnam Vet cap.

  “You were mechanized when you were there, huh?”

  “Yeah. We did a lot of humpin’, but sooner or later you knew you’d get back to that fifty.”

  “We did a lot of walkin’. We walked all over the freakin’ Central Highlands. All over them damn mountains.”

  “Another thing with the mech unit, we were never in the rear. I think out of the whole time I was there, almost eleven months, I went to base camp when I got there and I went on R&R—that was it.”

  “When the tracks were movin’, they knew you were comin’, and they knew when you were going to get there, so that B-40 rocket was sittin’ there waitin’. He had a lot of time to polish it up and put your name on it.”

  Suddenly Louie butts in, speaks up. “We’re here,” he says straight out to the four strangers. “We’re here, right? We’re all here. Let me do names. Let me do names and addresses.” And he takes his notepad out of his back pocket and, while leaning on his cane, writes down all their information so he can mail them the newsletter he and Tessie publish and send out, on their own, a couple of times a year.

  Then they are passing the empty chairs. They hadn’t seen them on the way in, so intent were they on getting Les to the Wall without his falling down or breaking away. At the end of the parking lot, there are forty-one brownish-gray old metal bridge chairs, probably out of some church basement and set up in slightly arced rows, as at a graduation or an award ceremony—three rows of ten, one row of eleven. Great care has been taken to arrange them just so. Taped to the backrest of each chair is somebody’s name—above the empty seat, a name, a man’s name, printed on a white card. A whole section of chairs off by itself, and, so as to be sure that nobody sits down there, it is roped off on each of the four sides with a sagging loop of intertwined black and purple bunting.

  And a wreath is hanging there, a big wreath of carnations, and when Louie, who doesn’t miss a thing, stops to count them, he finds, as he suspected, that the carnations number forty-one.

  “What’s this?” asks Swift.

  “It’s the guys from Pittsfield that died. It’s their empty chairs,” Louie says.

  “Son of a bitch,” Swift says. “What a fuckin’ slaughter. Either fight to win or don’t fight at all. Son of a fuckin’ bitch.”

  But the afternoon isn’t over for them yet. Out on the pavement in front of the Ramada Inn, there is a skinny guy in glasses, wearing a coat much too heavy for the day, who is having a serious problem—shouting at passing strangers, pointing at them, spitting because he’s shouting so hard, and there are cops rushing in from the squad cars to try to talk him into calming down before he strikes out at someone or, if he has a gun hidden on him, pulls it out to take a shot. In one hand he holds a bottle of whiskey—that’s all he
appears to have on him. “Look at me!” he shouts. “I’m shit and everybody who looks at me knows I’m shit. Nixon! Nixon! That’s who did it to me! That’s what did it to me! Nixon sent me to Vietnam!”

  Solemn as they are as they pile into the van, each bearing the weight of his remembrances, there is the relief of seeing Les, unlike the guy cracking up on the street, in a state of calm that never before existed for him. Though they are not men given to expressing transcendent sentiments, they feel, in Les’s presence, the emotions that can accompany that kind of urge. During the course of the drive home, each of them—except for Les—apprehends to the greatest degree available to him the mystery of being alive and in flux.

  He looked serene, but that was a fakeout. He’d made up his mind. Use his vehicle. Take them all out, including himself. Along the river, come right at them, in the same lane, in their lane, round the turn where the river bends.

  He’s made up his mind. Got nothin’ to lose and everything to gain. It isn’t a matter of if that happens or if I see this or if I think this I will do it and if I don’t I won’t. He’s made up his mind to the extent that he’s no longer thinking. He’s on a suicide mission, and inside he is agitated big-time. No words. No thoughts. It’s just seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling—it’s anger, adrenaline, and it’s resignation. We’re not in Vietnam. We’re beyond Vietnam.

  (Taken again in restraints to the Northampton VA a year later, he tries putting into plain English for the psychologist this pure state of something that is nothing. It’s all confidential anyway. She’s a doc. Medical ethics. Strictly between the two of them. “What were you thinking?” “No thinking.” “You had to be thinking something.” “Nothing.” “At what point did you get in your truck?” “After dark.” “Had you had dinner?” “No dinner.” “Why did you think you were getting into the truck?” “I knew why.” “You knew where you were going.” “To get him.” “To get who?” “The Jew. The Jew professor.” “Why were you going to do that?” “To get him.” “Because you had to?” “Because I had to.” “Why did you have to?” “Kenny.” “You were going to kill him.” “Oh yes. All of us.” “There was planning, then.” “No planning.” “You knew what you were doing.” “Yes.” “But you did not plan it.” “No.” “Did you think you were back in Vietnam?” “No Vietnam.” “Were you having a flashback?” “No flashbacks.” “Did you think you were in the jungle?” “No jungle.” “Did you think you would feel better?” “No feelings.” “Were you thinking about the kids? Was this payback?” “No payback.” “Are you sure?” “No payback.” “This woman, you tell me, killed your children, ‘a blow job,’ you told me, ‘killed my kids’—weren’t you trying to get back at her, to take revenge for that?” “No revenge.” “Were you depressed?” “No, no depression.” “You were out to kill two people and yourself and you were not angry?” “No, no more anger.” “Sir, you got in your truck, you knew where they would be, and you drove into their headlights. And you’re trying to tell me you weren’t trying to kill them.” “I didn’t kill them.” “Who killed them?” “They killed themselves.”)