Do you have the kopi luwak?
He nodded in satisfaction when I placed the package on his desk, and I watched him examine the bean’s anatomy, his letter opener revealing a sliver of the white core. Satisfied, the Boss laid down the blade and said, Anything else?
The hashish . . .
He grinned and leaned back in his chair. Good stuff, right?
So I’ve heard. I haven’t tried it myself.
Good. There are some things you should neither try nor buy.
I saw myself explaining, with the enthusiasm of a sales pitch, the situation with BFD and the Maoist PhD. I gave them a taste of the goods, I heard myself saying. My screw was quite loose at that moment, providing me with enough distance to see myself become what I swore I would never become: a capitalist.
Interesting, the Boss said, the fingers of his hands touching in a steeple. Not that it’s a surprise. Not at all. Even those people would enjoy the things I can give them.
They’re only human. So very human.
Exactly! He was greatly amused, if the smile on his face was any indication. Even the French are only human. The rich, too. Especially the rich.
I’m not sure that they’re rich. They’re intellectuals.
If they don’t work with their hands, they’re rich. And that politician is definitely rich. I know his name. He’s the one in charge of this arrondissement. He’s as bad as the rest of the politicians. They’re all sleazy socialists and caviar communists.
I totally agree, I said, performing my best yes-man act.
But even if you’re not a politician or an intellectual—he turned his palms to me so I could see the map of his toil, the scars and calluses of his personal geography—that doesn’t mean you can’t get rich by working with your hands.
This is a new opportunity. A new market.
Grow or die. That’s my thinking.
It’s a good philosophy.
He checked the symmetrical white cuticles of his fingernails, manicured at a nail salon that he owned, then looked at me again. If eyes were the windows to a soul, he had blackout curtains pulled shut behind his. What do you want?
What I wanted was revenge, but as I watched myself with that unfeeling sense that I was a stranger even to me, all I heard myself say was: You supply, I sell.
He named a price for the goods, per gram. I explained that I was a refugee working a menial job—not that there was anything wrong with the job he had given me, all refugees have to start somewhere, that somewhere being at the bottom, where we offered our bottom to be kicked, which provided endless merriment for the citizenry of our host countries. The point was that I did not have the capital to purchase the goods. Instead of investing my nonexistent financial capital in his goods, I offered to barter my social capital, my access to my aunt’s friends, for his goods. In exchange, I would expand his market and deliver to him profits he would not otherwise have, divided fifty-fifty between us, after deducting the cost of the goods.
Something behind the curtains twitched. Thirty percent.
Forty percent.
He was amused. Twenty-five percent.
It was difficult to negotiate with someone who could take a hammer out of his desk drawer and break your knuckles or kneecaps without compunction or hesitation. You’re too generous, I said. The Boss nodded toward the door and told me to see Le Cao Boi, who would provide me with the goods. In parting he said, I’m not sure whether you’re less crazy or more crazy for wanting to do this.
I’m not crazy.
That’s what the crazy ones always say.
Looking back, it is clear to me now, as it must be to you, that perhaps the balance between my two minds, always precarious, had suddenly tilted too far right, into a place where I could watch myself becoming more and more about me and me alone, the best justification there was for capitalism. Did that make me crazy, as the Boss and many others have claimed? Maybe I was crazy, or a little bit crazy, or maybe I was simply flawed. Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others. Perhaps Saïd wanted to be human, too, despite being a drug dealer, or perhaps he was smarter than me and took his humanity for granted, which allowed him to be a drug dealer, as he had nothing to prove. Now he had disappeared and left an opportunity, a void in the market. Someone would eventually fill that void. Why not me?
By the time I arrived at the restaurant, an answer was waiting for my rhetorical question, a square brown paper package the size of a croque monsieur, wrapped with string. Sliding the package across the countertop, Le Cao Boi said, Glad you’ve decided to join us. His face was statuesque in its impassivity, the faint ghosts of me and myself floating in the lenses of his sunglasses. I matched his impassivity as I accepted the package and slipped it into a jacket pocket, where it rested against my hip with a pistol’s patience, utterly confident that it would, sooner or later, be used.
Bon watched the transaction from a table where he was refilling bottles of soy sauce with a chemist’s precision, the only person sitting in the barren restaurant. I hope you know what you’re doing, smart guy, he said.
Of course I don’t, I said, implying in my lighthearted way that I indeed did know what I was doing, even if, in fact, I did not. And it will give me a chance to improve my French, I went on. Nothing makes people more talkative than mutual intoxication.
You could just go to school to refine your French.
Yes, but you always told me that not all the answers can be found in books.
I’ll tell you what else you can’t find in a book, Le Cao Boi said. The Boss expects at least a twenty percent return. He doesn’t like to waste his time. Or his goods. In other words, you better make this little investment worthwhile.
Hey, new guy, Sleepy called out from the kitchen. The toilet needs cleaning!
I left the worst Asian restaurant in Paris with the sound of Sleepy’s laughter in my ears, the scent of disinfectant on my hands, and the taste of bile on my tongue. Only a shot of revenge could wash that taste away. I would not be the obsequious Asiatic object of pity, the pathetic or polite little refugee who would agree to begin from the beginning, as a student of my master’s language—
Hey you!
—or as a waiter or a busboy or a dishwasher—
You!
—or a plumber—
YOU!
I froze. The voice, loud and stern, seemed aimed at me, although I was not the only one on the street who turned. Everyone around me pivoted to see a pair of policemen striding toward us, the one in front pointing his finger at me. I knew exactly why. Something was transmitting a signal on the invisible airwaves. Although the packet in my pocket was silent, that did not mean it had nothing to say. No, it exuded a sense of confidence, perhaps even a touch of menace, as all valuable things did. It had power over me, as it was well aware. I could throw it away, of course, destroy it in any number of ways, and it could do nothing to stop me—except simply by existing.
YOU!
The policemen suddenly broke into a run, and my body and mind became quite calm as they braced themselves. I had felt that same stillness on the boat as it soared into the sky, borne on the wave. Hashish, the packet in my pocket whispered, knowing only its own name. Hashish. It knew that it was literally more valuable than me. It had a price that people were willing to pay, whereas my life had almost no value at all. Because no one would pay for me what one would for the goods in the packet, I was now in debt to it. I was about to raise my hands in surrender to it and to the policemen, but they charged right past me, one on either side, close enough that their sleeves brushed mine.
YOU!
They were not shouting at me after all, but at a shambolic man whose hair was so unkempt and skin was so unwashe
d that he was of indeterminate race or ethnicity, which was the French ideal. Everyone could be French, including the homeless!
One policeman jerked a beer can from the bewildered bum’s hand and shoved him against a wall. The other cop kicked him in the seat of his pants and sent him nearly tumbling to the ground, all while the rest of the upstanding citizens—and me, not to mention myself—stood watching. When the policeman with the beer can hurled it at the back of the bewildered bum, splashing him with its contents, which seemed to defeat the purpose of making him less hideous to Parisian eyes, I averted my own eyes and walked past the scene in silence.
That night, my aunt and I smoked the finest hashish and drank the finest Haut-Médoc and listened to the finest American jazz, that black-and-blue music so beloved by the French partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism. Since I was also black and blue all over, at least on the inside, Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” was a perfect accompaniment for me. And then there was my aunt, who had finished my confession and was feeling kind of blue herself. She remained unbothered by what had happened to me, imprisoned with a thousand fetid fellows for a year on starvation rations, forced to write and rewrite a confession, and then, for the coup de grâce, thrown into solitary confinement, naked, with sacks over my head, hands, and feet, periodically jolted by low-level electricity that kept me awake for an unknown amount of time, until I could no longer distinguish my body from its surroundings, time itself losing meaning as I was bombarded with an unrelenting sonic attack composed of an infant’s recorded howling, until at last I could pass the final exam. It was this exam, which she had finally gotten to, that disturbed my aunt, leading her to mutter over and over again its only question:
WHAT IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?
Like every good revolutionary, my aunt already knew the answer, Ho Chi Minh’s most famous slogan, a spell that mobilized millions to rise and die in order to evict the French and then the Americans, to unify our country and liberate it. After she muttered the question, she declaimed the answer, first as an incantation, which was how it was intended to be said:
NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM!
And then again with her voice rising, as a question:
NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM?
Exactly, I said sadly, shaking my head and giving her for free what had cost me so much to learn. Nothing is, in fact, more precious than independence and freedom.
No, no, no! Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom—I mean, independence and freedom are more precious than nothing, not the other way around!
You read my confession. I sighed, then inhaled so deeply from the laced cigarette that my lungs sizzled, the smoke that issued forth reminding me of how everything solid eventually melts into air. Have you learned nothing?
Shut up! she cried. Give me that cigarette.
Doesn’t nothing make more sense after hashish?
No. Nothing makes sense at all after your confession.
Of course it does. You just refuse to make sense of nothing, as most people do. Now if you had gone through reeducation like I had, under the hands of a master revolutionary theorist like Man, you would understand that nothing is contradictory, like everything meaningful—love and hate, capitalism and communism, France and America. Leave it to the simple-minded to understand only one side of a contradiction. You’re not simple-minded, are you?
I hate you, she groaned, eyes closed. Why did I invite you into my house?
It’s all quite funny, if you think about it. Almost as funny as the funniest part of my confession, said by none other than Man himself, which should be engraved on the pedestal of Ho Chi Minh’s statue, if he has a statue. Except that it is unprintable, as the truth too often is: “Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over—”
“We can fuck ourselves just fine,” she said.
I howled with laughter, slapped my knee, felt tears moistening my cheeks. This hashish was really something else! Come on, I said after my laughter had subsided. Isn’t that funny?
No. She stubbed out her cigarette. That’s not funny.
A trumpet blared and my vision was hazy, and if I could have seen myself in a mirror, I surely would have seen double of me, or two of us, not so much black and blue but red and yellow.
You used to believe in the revolution, she said. What do you believe in now?
Nothing, I said. But isn’t that something?
So you’re going to sell drugs.
Well, I muttered. Even under a cloud of hashish, I could see that her contempt had a point. It’s better than nothing.
My aunt drew herself up from where she had been reclining on the couch and turned off the stereo. So long as you were a revolutionary, I could have you living here for free as my service to the revolution and as an expression of my belief in solidarity, she said. She was remarkably eloquent after the hashish, or perhaps her passion had focused her. But if you’re going to be dealing drugs—
You’re making a moral judgment?
I make no moral judgment. I’m the one smoking hashish. And sometimes criminals make the best revolutionaries, or revolutionaries are condemned as criminals. But if you’re no longer a revolutionary and you’re going to be selling drugs, and sleeping on my couch, and asking me to protect you from Bon by keeping your communist past a secret, then you can afford to split the profits with me.
My mouth, already slightly agape under the influence of the hashish, fell completely open.
What’s the matter? she said, lighting another hashish cigarette. Too contradictory for you?
Walking the next morning to the Maoist PhD’s apartment from the metro, I experienced déjà vu for the second time in less than twelve hours (strange that even my psychic tics or malfunctions were named in the master’s language). The first time was when I offered to split the profits with my aunt fifty-fifty, only to have her counter with sixty-forty, terms to which I had to agree once again. The second time was walking on the Maoist PhD’s street, where I had the eerie sense that I had been there before, since his street evoked for me one of Saigon’s boulevards, or rather, Saigon’s boulevards evoked a street like his. The French had designed Saigon in the spirit of Haussmann’s Paris, with wide thoroughfares and broad sidewalks lined with fetching trees and elegant apartment buildings of no more than six or seven stories, decorated with balconies and capped by garrets where, during the heat of August, one could roast artists or the poor, which we in Saigon could do year-round. Oh, Saigon, Pearl of the Orient! Or so it was called, presumably by the French, using a term of endearment that we ourselves had adapted, for there was nothing the people of a small country liked better than to be flattered, so rarely did it happen. But sometimes we were not just the Pearl of the Orient, and sometimes the Pearl of the Orient did not even refer to us. I had heard the Chinese of Hong Kong claim that their port was the Pearl of the Orient, and when I was in the Philippines, the Filipinos insisted that Manila was the Pearl of the Orient. Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer. And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized. After all, as the Paris of the Orient, Saigon was just a cheap imitation of haute couture.
I had worked myself into such a lather of resentment that I was practically frothing at the mouth when Paris suddenly gave me a sticky reminder of one way that Saigon was considerably superior. Squish! I stopped and looked with dread and then disgust at the sole of my shoe. Nowhere in Saigon would the unwitting pedestrian have a chance of stepping on canine excrement, because the statistical truth was that we preferred to co
nsume canines rather than keep them as pets, and if we kept them, we never allowed them to wander the streets, for fear that they might be eaten. Vive la différence! Here in Paris, dogs roamed everywhere, liberated to do their business as they pleased. In this case, some degenerate Parisian dog owner, of whom thousands existed, had left the prize almost on the doorstep of the Maoist psychoanalyst’s building. The imprint of my sole was on the thick brown smear, ready for a detective to study my shoeprint. No amount of scraping against the cement would get rid of the foul substance from the crevices of my shoe. I gave up, hesitated before buzzing the Maoist PhD’s apartment, but then remembered the first lesson of capitalism, which was so hard for Vietnamese people to learn: Never be late. I pressed the button.
In the tiny elevator, which offered room for no more than three adults of average French build, or four Vietnamese of average Vietnamese build, or perhaps three and a half Eurasians like me, the odor from my shoe was evident. I kept my sole off the floor, and when the Maoist PhD let me into his apartment, I did my best to walk in that manner, limping, I said, because of a sore ankle. It was not my fault that the French were not as civilized as Asians, who believed, for very good reason, that one should take off one’s shoes before entering a house. In this regard, the French were medieval.
You have a beautiful apartment, I said in rapid-fire English when he greeted me in his rapid-fire French. He hesitated, but in the end he replied in English. Like BFD, he could not pass up the chance to prove to someone like me that he could speak today’s imperial lingua franca. Like BFD, the Maoist PhD’s English was good but accented. He would know all too well how impeccable mine was, judging from the framed posters of The Big Sleep, Vertigo, King Kong, and Frankenstein hanging on the walls. His gilt-edged mirrors were door-sized, his furniture was varnished with age, his Turkish rug was intricate, and his parquet floorboards moaned underfoot. All were fitting decor for an eighteenth-century apartment with exposed beams and a ceiling tall enough to circulate the heated air of a hardworking brain.
I nearly forgave him for being a French intellectual when he poured me two fingers of a brand of fifteen-year-old scotch whose name was so Gaelic I could neither spell nor pronounce it. I closed my eyes in appreciation, shivering and swirling the magic potion in my mouth and over my deprived tongue, which had drunk more wine than spirits here in Paris. I happily offered the Maoist the goods, and the generous soul immediately rolled a cigarette with the product and offered to share it with me in communist fraternity.
The Committed Page 6
