LOOK,
MAMA,
LOOK!
which indeed made everyone within earshot look at me, and I kept my monstrous self very still in the manner of a gecko on a wall who knows that it has been spotted, blending into the background while the mama did nothing to prevent her half-cute, half-creepy offspring from staring at me with her adorable, buglike eyes, and eventually I ripped her gaze off me as I exited at the appropriate transfer at Belleville and walked through the crowds at a normal pace to the connecting line, altogether a thirty-minute journey in which no one said a word to me, who discouraged any words by putting on my headphones and listening to Jacques Brel singing “Ne me quitte pas” over and over until I finally understood that he wanted to be the shadow of a dog, whereupon I made it to the restaurant, where Le Cao Boi said, What the fuck happened to you? which I would have said to me as well, knowing that this was one of the more affectionate things that could be said between one man and another, an expression of care and concern that promised action, and when I attempted to sit down at a table he pulled me into the kitchen, where the Seven Dwarfs washed out my hand in a blue plastic bowl also used to clean fish, the clear water growing murky and red with my blood before they anointed me with iodine and eucalyptus oil, both of which made the skin of my palm and the bruises on my head and throat blaze, a fire that lent a hot halo to Bon when he loomed in my vision, saying, I’ll kill the motherfuckers, the subtext of which was obviously that he loved me, but what really made me sentimental and bawl uncontrollably was when he said, I’m going to gut them and make them eat their own shit fresh from their bowels, a delightful culinary image that provoked the Seven Dwarfs into much laughter, a few of them drawing their cleavers and mock fighting each other as Le Cao Boi improvised a terrible ode to me, the weeping warrior returned from his journey, which there is no need to quote, and in fact it was so awful that I have forgotten the words, but Le Cao Boi was not offended by my lack of enthusiasm, ascribing it, I am sure, to my physical condition, the manly pain that the Seven Dwarfs could understand and the awful, embarrassing tears that they could not, and to cover up my weakness Le Cao Boi brought me a bottle of Chinese liquor that looked like water, or vodka, the transparent fluid removing a layer of tender pink skin cells when poured down my throat, helping me for a brief moment to stanch my tears and forget my split palm, wrapped in a doughnut of bandages, and when I said, Give me some more, he said, I got something better than that, disappearing from my sight and then reappearing with a square of aluminum in his hand on which he had plated a single white lump of sugar, the morsel as a meal, the kind of presentation one might expect in a Michelin-starred restaurant, except it wasn’t white sugar but, as Le Cao Boi proclaimed, the remedy, which would take too long to affect me if I swallowed it, whether whole or diluted, so he crushed it in a mortar and pestle and put it back on the aluminum square, holding it beneath my face with one hand while using his other hand to flick on a lighter beneath the square, the white powder dissolving into a sizzling, smoking puddle of liquid clarity as one of the Seven Dwarfs handed me a clear plastic tube, the barrel of a pen from which the ink cartridge had been removed, Le Cao Boi telling me to inhale through the tube, which I did, because if doctors and scientists are so daring and ethical as to always experiment on themselves then so should WE, a monstrous creation whose two-faced appearance was grotesque to all who beheld us, me and myself, and maybe moi, the two faces—or was it now three—that only a mother could love, our mother, who died today, or perhaps yesterday, and who will most likely die tomorrow, our mother dying every day and living every day in our memory, there never being a day when WE did not think of her and how WE were not there by her side when she passed, a crime as unforgivable as the crime of our birth in breaking out of our mother and beginning the lifelong process of our separation from her, the memory of it causing us to weep once more, which everyone thought was due to the beating or the remedy, with Le Cao Boi saying, It’s incredible, isn’t it? to which WE could only close our eyes and moan, our faces coming together as one so that WE were completely in focus to ourselves, on the surface and underneath, all the thousand different layers of ourselves that stretched from the present to the past merging into the flaky, sweet, addictive, fattening mille-feuille of our histories and identities, all of us existing at the same moment, glued together by the perennial, sticky questions, such as what did this mean? who were WE? what were WE? where did WE come from? where were WE going? what have WE done? what will WE do?—unanswerable questions that barely let us breathe, so intensely did WE feel our body, our present, our past, and our future, until we could no longer feel our body at all, the border between it and the world dissolving completely so that every wave of light and sound and touch rippled through us and washed us away into a whirlpool of euphoric, even orgasmic, sensation that lasted for an unknown amount of time until the whirlpool was no longer bringing us ever deeper into the depths but reversed course and spiraled above us, turning into a staircase of light, where, at the top, Bon said, I might as well tell you what I’ve just heard, his words flowing right over our skin, the faceless man is at the embassy, which was the only thing that could ruin the pleasure of the remedy, for there could be only one faceless man, a frightful, fearful figure somehow conjured back into existence by the mere presence of Bon’s idea, which was now clearly a sign of fate taking form, and somehow WE had always known that WE would not be apart from him for long, WE who were not just monstrous or grotesque but awesome, so amazing that at some point WE walked down the staircase of light to the bakery next door, refusing to eat at the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, weeping slightly at the many intriguing varieties of bread and pastries that collectively embodied centuries of good taste and culinary sophistication and technical complexity, such as the Negro heads that the Boss loved so much but for which WE were not in the mood, no, WE needed something more filling than meringue and chocolate after what WE had been through, a journey that left us still vibrating at a low intensity on our way back down to mundane reality, our skin a topography of erogenous zones and our finger shaking as WE pointed at a thick oval of rustic bread that WE had never ordered before but about which WE had been curious ever since learning its name, which WE now pronounced in the most perfect French by saying, I’d like a bastard, if you please.
Part Two
Myself
CHAPTER 6
I have a dream! Martin Luther King Jr. said.
I was coming down from nearly having reached Heaven, or I was rising from nearly having descended into Hell. The soles of my feet were singed from the heat of Hell, and my nose was dripping from the chilliness of shivering in the clouds of Heaven, where I had stood at the gates. The revving of a two-stroke engine broke the reverential atmosphere, and a motorbike roared past the line of hopefuls and cut right in front of Martin Luther King Jr. That was my first clue that the rider was Vietnamese. Who was it? No, it couldn’t be—it was!—Le Duan, general secretary of the Communist Party! Ho Chi Minh’s successor! One of the founding fathers of our reunified country! A truly committed man! A revolutionary crazy enough to have voluntarily gone from the south to the north when everyone sensible, including my mother, was heading in the exact opposite direction! What the hell was he doing here?
Who are you? Martin Luther King Jr. said.
I am the man with the plan! Le Duan hopped off his motorbike, grinning and not at all offended about having to explain who he was. That was the fate of anyone from a small country, no matter how accomplished. Even when we had names, hardly anyone besides our countrymen knew what they were or could pronounce them. It might be better to be nameless, since then no one could get our names wrong. Not that anyone in our country would get Le Duan’s name wrong.
This very committed man continued: I am the magician who took the upper half of our country and sewed it back onto the lower half of our country! And then I gave it the iron backbone of our revolution, so that it could stand up for itself! And th
en I dug around in a graveyard and found a brain for our new creation! So what if the brain came from a foreigner, Karl Marx? Let’s not be racist here. The Germans make very fine brains, just as good as their cars. See our country down below? It’s wobbling a bit, sure, but what do you expect so soon after such a radical surgery on both the backbone and the brain? I’d like to see you try to walk, much less run, after having been abused for so long and after such an intense operation to rid our body of all its foreign bodies. The Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Americans, they all took their turn with us. Now—and here Le Duan nudged Martin Luther King Jr.—you’re not the only one with a dream, buddy! Grinning with glee, Le Duan pointed at his motorbike and crowed, I have a dream, too!
We all looked at the logo on his Honda motorbike, and it indeed said,
DREAM
A Honda Dream? Was I dreaming? The Japanese, after proving that they could make transistor radios and tape cassette recorders, were now making dreams, too? I had never heard of such a dream until this dream, but now that I had heard of it, I wanted that Japanese Dream, too! How dreamy! It must be so much better than an American Dream! The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep-sea diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit. The Japanese Dream, however, must be really kinky. I longed for that dream with such hunger that I forgot that dreams could get you killed, which was the appropriate moment to wake from the dream to find myself with a clump of crusty bread in my mouth, sitting on the lowered seat of the toilet in the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, which, judging from the nauseating odor, I had apparently done a terrible job of cleaning. I can only blame someone else, which is to say me, a sane person who wanted no part of that disgusting bathroom. The air was fetid, the aroma somewhere between armpit, belly button, and the sweaty folds of the nether regions. The orifice of the toilet was the mirror of the anus, each one a portal into mysterious depths and twisting tunnels, which was why I had to lower the seat rather than gaze, gagging, into the chute.
Pull yourself together! I told myself. That was hard to do, as I was sobbing, partly out of pain, partly out of regret, and partly from the aftereffects of the remedy, one of which was similar to how I had sometimes felt after a fling with someone I barely knew: disgust. Mama! I moaned. Mama! What have I done?
Don’t worry, the crapulent major said. They’re not dead.
If they were, Sonny added, they’d already be here with us.
Get out of the bathroom, I said. The remedy had worn off, like love, leaving me with the pain in my hand and the desperate desire to fall in love again, even for one night, even knowing the shameful outcome. Give me some privacy!
But we haven’t talked in so long, the crapulent major said, peering over my right shoulder into the mirror. Sonny nodded behind my left shoulder, his face as pale and bloodless as the major’s, even though the hole in the major’s forehead, his third eye, was still leaking blood, as was the hole in Sonny’s hand, one of several places where I had shot him. Did ghosts ever stop bleeding, stop weeping, stop returning? The fact that my mother had never appeared to me meant that she must be content in her afterlife. She had no reason to haunt me, for I was her good son, the one who always thought about her, who kept her picture in his wallet and spoke to it every night. In the black-and-white picture, taken shortly before I left for the lycée so that I would have a memento of her, she is wearing an ao dai borrowed from one of my aunts. She needed to borrow only the dress, not the pants, as she was being photographed from the shoulders up. Her hair had been styled professionally, in a salon, with a curling iron, so that it floats around her face in waves. For once, her face, usually so plain, has been adorned with blush and mascara and lipstick. I always knew my mother was beautiful, but I also knew it was hard to be beautiful when one was exhausted, which was her normal condition. Here in the photograph, her burdens—namely, her son and her life—had been magically erased, leaving only her beauty. I kept my mother’s photograph to remind me of her, but also to make me remember that so many others among the wretched of the earth could look like angels, and vice versa, if history were different. I wanted to ask my ghosts if they had seen my mother, but I did not want them to see the child who still lived within me, the boy who screamed for his mama every morning.
So you haven’t seen them on your side? I asked.
What, you think we know everybody here? Sonny pretended to be incredulous. Sarcasm was even more irritating when it came from a ghost. There’s only about a hundred billion of us.
Give or take a few billion, the crapulent major said. Not exactly sure, since the afterlife doesn’t have a census department. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a gated enclave with someone checking you in.
It’s also a little dark and murky, Sonny added. Hard to get a clear visual.
Which is a good thing. People in the afterlife are not the best-looking.
On average. There are some exceptions.
Yes, but the die-young, leave-a-beautiful-corpse crowd is unbearable.
The die-old-and-alone, leave-a-decaying-corpse crowd tends to be humbler.
But they keep to themselves.
Even so, they stink. That’s what nobody tells you about the afterlife. It smells like rotten meat and putrid water and black mold.
You can’t have everything, I said. The point is, if somebody were dead, you may not see them there, but I would most likely see them here.
If you killed them, Sonny said. As you did us.
That’s generally how haunting works, the crapulent major added.
You haven’t been haunting me for a while.
What can we say? We’ve been sightseeing. Paris is a great city. So much history! So many catacombs to explore! So many ghosts to meet! Anybody who’s anybody is at Père Lachaise!
I left them in the restaurant’s bathroom, the sound of their laughter coming through the closed door. Were they real or were they side effects of the remedy? They must be real, as I had seen them before. Their reappearance as a familiar comedy duo told me that what I dreaded had not happened. Beatles and Rolling Stones were alive, not doomed to be prehistoric amphibians dragging themselves from the amniotic underworld by their fingernails. And the communist agent must not be dead, either, for I had never seen her beside me, taunting me, as I had seen the crapulent major and Sonny.
Those guys aren’t dead, Bon agreed. In the restaurant’s kitchen, abandoned except for us, he poured me a large whiskey, my favorite kind. It’s hard enough for you to kill somebody with a gun. Your conscience gets in the way. And killing with a knife takes something special. You don’t have it in you to finish someone off at that close range. But don’t tell the Boss that. With the Boss, you tell him those guys are dead.
They’re kids, I said. The whiskey slid down my throat and coated my decaying insides with a fresh layer of paint. My hand throbbed where Grumpy had stitched the wound shut, whistling the entire time. More, I said. It was one of my favorite words, as long as I was the one saying it.
They’re men. Bon refilled my glass. Young men, but old enough to go to war, to die in war. I’ve seen kids younger than that fight, kill, die. You think they planned to let you just walk away? No. It was going to be murder or serious harm, two versus one. You have every right in that situation to save your skin. Now, if it was me, they would be dead. Because that’s the only guarantee that they don’t come after you. Like with the faceless man.
Even mentioning him out loud brought a chill to the kitchen, where we crouched on low plastic stools that reminded us of home, our knees nearly level with our chests. The faceless man was our blood brother, the third Musketeer, though Bon did not know this, having seen him only from a distance in the reeducation camp. To Bon, the faceless man was simply the camp commissar, whereas to me the commissar was our blood brother, Man. What a fate it
was, to be interrogated and then tortured by my best friend, the one who knew me better than I knew myself, the one who put his gun in my hand and tried to get me to shoot him even as I was strapped down for my torture. He was in as much pain as I was. But I couldn’t finish him, just as he couldn’t finish me.
The Committed Page 10
