How did you find out about him?
You think it’s going to stay a secret for long when someone without a face shows up? He’s at the embassy. At least he’s wearing a mask, or so they say. A war hero, they call him.
If he’s wearing a mask, how do you know it’s the faceless man?
How many people need to wear a mask? Only if they’re faceless!
I sipped my whiskey and said, What’s his name?
He said a name that was not Man’s. Dung.
What I thought was that it was a nom de plume, an alias, for it meant “heroic” in our tongue, “shit” in English, and nothing at all in French. What I said was: How do you know he was the commissar? Even the camp guards just called him by his rank. And how many guys are walking around without a face after the war? You don’t know it’s him for sure.
You want evidence? Fine. We’ll have to get close enough to him to see. And then we’ll kill him. Or at least I’ll kill him.
I drained my glass. Sometimes I preferred to sip my whiskey, to draw out the experience, because it was so good, and sometimes I needed to pour it down my throat as fast as possible, cranking up my liver to full throttle, because life was so bad.
How do you not feel guilty about all the men you’ve killed?
I only have to feel guilty if it’s a crime. He refilled our glasses. Now drink up.
One hundred percent! I said, my sacred glass of spirits clinking against his. Spirits delivered us to another world, even if it was one often populated with angels, demons, ghosts, and figments. I hadn’t told Bon about my ghosts, as that would only confirm my unsteadiness to him. But ghosts were as real and as invisible as termites, nibbling away unseen at one’s foundations. How did one fumigate the dead? The remedy was an easy answer, but it only salved the living, or whoever passed for the living, like me.
But I was afraid of the remedy. It felt so good that it reminded me of religion.
The Boss called later that night and summoned me for a visit to his apartment the next day, a sign of heightened respect. Bon went home and I spent the night lying on a cot in the restaurant, behind the counter, because I did not want my aunt to see me with a bruised face and lacerated hand. The throbbing pain kept me awake and transported me back to my cell at the reeducation camp, naked and strapped to the floor, the entire ceiling covered in lightbulbs, the room so bright that closing my eyes did nothing to hide the glare. Man had successfully managed to probe that most inaccessible part of me, my mind . . . even, perhaps, my soul, if such a thing existed. Maybe, if I met him again, he would reveal more of me that I still did not know. Maybe that was why my instinct had led me to seek shelter with my aunt, knowing she would tell Man all about me. Now he had come to the neutral ground of Paris, the city where the end of the war had been brokered. He had come for me. And Bon.
I shivered and listened for the rustle of the cockroaches and the scurrying of mice. For the first time I noticed, beneath the cash register, on an open shelf, a stash of pornographic magazines, their covers and pages sticky with what I hoped was grease. Despite the pain in my head and hand, something inside me twitched, the threads running from my eyes, through my two minds, and down to the other pair of orbs that made me a man. The glossy, pale bodies of these very sincere young women seemed carved from marzipan, breasts looming much larger than average. Their makeup was applied as artfully as for a wedding, but while my eyes and my minds responded, the rest of me refused, distracted by the pain in my hand. Putting away the magazines, I wondered what the reason was for my actions, why the young men—boys, really—had assaulted me, why I had repaid them in kind. And, above all, besides my concern about failing to achieve the necessary structural rigidity for ejaculation even with the dirty magazines, I wondered what the reason was for my certainly dubious and perhaps unnecessary existence.
Perhaps the Boss would provide an answer one day. He was not my creator, but he was my re-creator, giving me a chance not through a gift but a loan. If God resided in Heaven, then the Boss’s domain was a casino, heaven to some and hell to others. He ran his schemes from his home, located a few blocks from his import-export store, in a brutalist tower of thirty or so stories that I made my way to the next morning, dull from the pain and lack of sleep. The tower was so distinctly un-Parisian that the nearest major traffic marker was place d’Italie, as if the disastrous architecture could be blamed on Mussolini. The culmination of a presumably socialist vision, the architecture amounted to a stack of shoeboxes, with humans being the shoes. This efficient design was meant to house enormous numbers of people on limited amounts of earth, given the problem in central Paris of limited land and many people, or so the Boss told me as we sat on the hot rod of his scarlet leather sofa.
Look at the view, he said.
The Boss lived halfway up the tower and the sofa faced the living room window, with a matching sofa perpendicular to it. This other sofa faced a behemoth television set, approximately the weight of an adult gorilla and flanked by speakers the size of teenagers. Like all male refugees, the Boss was fascinated by gigantic audiovisual equipment, the better with which to see the videos and listen to the music that transported him home. The French, from what I could see in the apartments of my aunt and the Maoist PhD, preferred smaller television sets, preserving the precious space of their small homes for books, mirrors, and mementos collected from their trips to flea markets and their four weeks of paid vacation per year. We, meanwhile, got no vacations, or at least no vacations to exotic locations, unless you counted the countries where we came from, which were not exotic to us. Coming from the ancient cultures of Asia, which were much more antique than the merely old culture of France, we desired the modern, the gleamingly new, with some exceptions, like the clock above the television, which was identical to the clock in the Boss’s office, carved from wood in the shape of our country.
The view is spectacular, I said.
Here, try one of these, the Boss said, pointing to a tin of Danish butter cookies on his pseudo-marble coffee table, which could also function as the mortar against which a hard head could be pounded. I was averse to dairy but reluctantly plucked a butter cookie from its paper cradle out of politeness.
When those kids were attacking me, they said they were butter.
Butter? said the Boss.
Butter? said Le Cao Boi.
The secretary laughed. She sat on the other couch next to Le Cao Boi, both watching an episode of Fantasia on the behemoth television, its volume muted to the background hum of gossip. The luscious secretary was young, healthy, and slender, as well as tall, haughty, and skimpily dressed. Those elements multiplied, like three times three, to a total greater than their sum. Her taut skin glowed with the light rising from the furnace of her ovaries, her long black hair was as full and voluptuous as the rest of her, and her breasts appeared perfectly delectable, of such appropriate shape and tasteful size that I would have been happy to be reincarnated as her brassiere. Yes, I looked, because there was no way a man can not look—is there?
They didn’t say they were butter, she said with a slight sneer. They said they were butter.
What? I said.
B-e-u-r-r-e is “butter,” she said very, very slowly, staring at me while the Boss and Le Cao Boi chuckled. B-e-u-r is slang for people born here whose parents are Arab.
I took a bite of my butter cookie and tried to hide my gag reflex at its taste. When the Boss poured me a cup of green tea and looked at me expectantly, I realized I was being given some extra-special hospitality. Before I could pick up the hot cup, the Boss said, You want coffee instead? He snapped his fingers before I could reply and his secretary turned her head. Get some coffee for everybody, the Boss said.
She pouted on cue and uncrossed her crossed legs, the maneuver making me swallow the burst of saliva in my throat. We all looked at her walk toward the kitchen, wordlessly admiring her perfect posterior. When she disappe
ared into the kitchen, the Boss reclined and said, The Eiffel Tower. Right there. Well, not right there. In the distance. But still, the Eiffel Tower, right? I have a pair of binoculars here if you want a closer look. People are paying stupid amounts of money to live close to the Eiffel Tower, and I’m paying barely anything and I can see it just fine! Who’s smarter? No people sightseeing out here to bother me when I go downstairs. No cops worrying about tourists or rich residents. That’s who they want to protect, tourists and bankers. This place? If it was full of white people, cops would be here like fruit flies on fruit. But white people don’t want to live here. Not enough parks, not enough charm, not enough je ne sais quoi. But most important, not enough white people. A self-fulfilling prophecy. When there’s already a lot of white people, white people will come. When there’s not enough white people, white people are nervous about moving in. So we had an opportunity.
We?
Asians! Chinese, Vietnamese. Your yellow brothers and sisters, or half brothers and half sisters. We took over. We always live where we have to, mostly because we have no choice. Well, actually, I could have gone to the United States. But I chose France. You know why? Less competition. There’re already plenty of Asian entrepreneurs in the United States. The Asians in France are fewer, and the ones who are here are sheep. But this Asian community here will grow, and they will need my services.
By “entrepreneur,” the Boss clearly meant “gangster,” but I only said, I’ve been to the United States. Definitely a lot of entrepreneurs there.
Right. More opportunity here. And if I see an opportunity, I’m going to take it. Not taking an opportunity is like not taking food when you have the chance. And when it comes to food, we eat what we can, when we can. Right? Look. He pointed at the iridescent cherries on the coffee table, nestled in a white plastic bowl imprinted with a blue pattern invoking Ming vases. What do you see?
The black-haired heads of refugees in an unseaworthy vessel, jammed so tightly together that none could move. I could not help but whimper at the memory, but I suppressed it and said, Cherries?
Imperfect cherries, the Boss said, pretending not to notice my unmanly weakness.
While some of the cherries were spherical and quite perfect, so deep and darkly red that they verged on black, others bloomed in odd shapes and sizes. Several had twinned with fellow cherries, which, if the pairing was symmetrical, resembled a duality of buttocks. In most cases, one cherry was bigger than the other, lending the fruit the appearance of a hunchback.
I get them from the Chinese market, because the French markets—the white markets—would never sell them. The Boss picked up a deformed twin and popped it in his mouth. But they’re cheaper and taste exactly the same. Just as an ugly tit tastes the same as a good-looking one, so long as you close your eyes.
So you would take the ugly one over the good-looking one? asked Le Cao Boi.
The Boss smiled and said, What, you think I’m an idiot? Of course it’s nice if things look pretty, but you can live when things don’t. I can buy a place next to the Eiffel Tower, but why? People—white people—will think, Who’s the Asiatic guy? Cops will think, What’s an Asiatic doing here? My neighbors will think, I can’t believe someone yellow has moved in. Funny thing about white people. They think we Asians stick together too much, but when white people come to our country, all they do is stick together.
Le Cao Boi laughed and so did the secretary. She had come back into the room with a silver tray, on which rested three glasses, each with a half inch of condensed milk at the bottom. On top of each glass stood an aluminum filter from which the black coffee dripped slowly onto the condensed milk, and all was quiet as the secretary bent over to put the tray onto the coffee table. Then she sat down and I swallowed again and the Boss looked at me expectantly. Where were we? Oh, yes, kissing the Boss’s ass. I laughed, too, although only for a second, because the noise caused my skull to ring. He nodded and said, And here, white people tell us we shouldn’t stick together, and then when we don’t stick together, they say we’ve lost our culture.
You can’t win, said Le Cao Boi.
Yes, you can, said the Boss. So long as you don’t look at the world the way white people look at the world. Once you do that, you lose. For example, white people think we’re sheep. And mostly, they aren’t wrong. Our people think that by being sheep, by following the law, they’ll be accepted and respected here. It’s pathetic. I’m going to change that because I understand that white people will not respect us until they fear us, and they won’t fear us until they think we can break their laws.
It’s true that we have no gangsters here, I said.
Gangsters! That’s one way to describe us. In the old country, they would call us pirates or bandits. We would have to hide in the ghettos or the marshes. But I prefer outlaws. And I prefer being here, not hiding somewhere. Here, I get my view and no one looks at me. I see everything and no one sees me.
You have a plan, I said.
Everyone should have a plan.
Since it would be stupid to admit that I did not have a plan, I nodded, but only once, as it hurt.
You don’t look too good.
No, he doesn’t, Le Cao Boi agreed.
Nothing that time or a plastic surgeon won’t fix. I know a guy.
A week or two for the face. The stitches in the hand will come out a little later.
, the Boss said in Chinese.
, Le Cao Boi agreed, laughing.
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about you.
Yes, we are.
Okay, yes, we are. If you don’t want us to talk about you, you should learn Chinese. Easy enough, right? Just like I hired somebody to teach me some French. Here the Boss nodded at his French teacher, who was also his secretary as well as his mistress. You did good, by the way. I didn’t think you had it in you.
Maybe he just got lucky, Le Cao Boi said.
We all get lucky. An honest man admits that. The Boss paused at the irony. Bon says you need a place to stay.
My aunt won’t be happy if I show up looking like this, I muttered.
She’s a civilian, Le Cao Boi said.
Not involved, I confirmed. And wouldn’t want to be.
She’s your connection to your network, the Boss said. We wouldn’t want to endanger that. All right, I’ve got a place for you. You’ll love it.
Is it like this?
Trust me, the view’s even better, the Boss said, grinning. He turned his gaze back to the windows spanning the width of the living room. What do you see?
The Eiffel Tower? I said.
Yes, yes, the Eiffel Tower. But what does it remind you of?
I hesitated. Even thinking hurt. A sundial?
A sundial? The Boss squinted. I guess so . . . but look again.
A finger?
Just one finger? Where are the other fingers?
I stared at the tower once more. A pipe?
Are you fucking blind? he cried. It’s a gigantic dick!
Le Cao Boi and the luscious secretary both chuckled at my lack of imagination.
Of course I realize that, I said feebly. It’s just a little . . . obvious.
If it was so obvious why didn’t you say it? the luscious secretary said.
College boy, Le Cao Boi said. Looks like a few days of rest will do you good.
Seven days, to be exact, the Boss said. By then you might look human again.
And then . . .
Then we’ll talk about plans.
I was in no condition to talk about plans or think about them, and yet an hour later there I was thinking as I sat in an RER train car rumbling toward a northern suburb. While I stared out at the grim prison blocks of apartment buildings and tried to hold myself together, I wondered if it was true, if the Eiffel Tower was just a Gallic erection thrusting forth from the supine French body, shooting off
bursts of clouds, seen and invisible at the same time.
Was it so obvious that it was not obvious?
Was the French empire simply exposing itself for all to see?
Was the Eiffel Tower any different from the Washington Monument, the white missile erupting from the American capital, foreshadowing all the nuclear missiles buried in silos across the American landscape?
Had a giant vagina ever served as the emblem of a nation’s sacrifice? I wondered. (Except, perhaps, for the Arc de Triomphe, the maternal thighs through which the French military passed every year on the fourteenth of July, or so I had seen in pictures from Paris Match, never having witnessed such a birth myself.) But besides that exception—
Had a womb ever become a monument?
Had a uterus ever been the model for a memorial?
Had a pair of breasts ever floated above a capitol?
Why had I never thought of these things before?
My neighbor got up and moved to another seat.
CHAPTER 7
Dizzy with my profundity, or just as likely dizzy with the ache in my head, I walked to my destination along a route where the houses and apartments were boring boxes two or three stories high, with cafés and brasseries few and far between. The depressed vegetables and disappointed fruits on display outside the two produce markets that I passed were the street’s saddest occupants besides myself, all of us yearning to be handled by nonjudgmental hands. Instead of looking like the France of my colonized imagination, this lackluster quarter had no place worth walking to and nothing worth walking by, as if it had been designed by an American or a Vietnamese. At last I came to a bruised green door on a melancholic street, where I pushed the doorbell and waited.
Allô?
I sighed and said what Le Cao Boi had told me to say, what he himself had come up with: I’d like to go to Heaven.
Are you kidding me? I had said to him, but he only shrugged. The clients don’t mind, so why should you? And what’s wrong with a little aspiration?
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