The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  BFD and the Maoist PhD looked at me with new interest, or possibly because my jaw had followed my spirit and dropped to the floor in astonishment. You’re not—that’s not—why—

  It’s all right, you’re among allies, my aunt said, waving her hand dismissively. The problem with you is that you live completely in your head. You have no one to talk to except me. Have you forgotten the importance of solidarity?

  I never would have imagined him as a spy, BFD said.

  Which is what makes him a good spy, the Maoist PhD said.

  At least I’m good at something! I shouted. And I do have someone to talk to besides you—I talk to myself all the time!

  And it shows, my aunt said.

  They were all looking at me as if I had said something deeply problematic like “I love America,” which one should never do among French intellectuals. One should confess to that only in private, as with a liking for pornography. I stood up so abruptly that I made myself dizzy, a vertigo that was compounded when I saw myself in the gilt-framed mirror hanging over my aunt’s fireplace, a man of two faces. Which face was I showing to myself and to them? Was I a revolutionary or a reactionary? And if I was a revolutionary, what did I believe in? To what was I committed? And was I myself or another? I mumbled an excuse and went to the bathroom, where I locked the door, absorbed some more of the remedy, and waited, trembling, for my nausea to subside.

  CHAPTER 9

  We—me, myself, and I—were neither real nor unreal but surreal, a condition that the holes in my head have not helped at all, a condition that was even more pronounced when we dusted ourselves with the white powder of the remedy, which we knew we should not do but which it was too easy to do, given how good such a dusting felt, or when we donned the guise of the Japanese tourist to once again walk the streets of Paris. With our glasses on, we had four eyes instead of two. Even though the lenses were fake, everything seemed sharper, more focused, even if we were high on hashish, or maybe because we were high on hashish, and even more so when we were high on the remedy, or when we multiplied hashish with the remedy. We found we needed to take a dosage of the remedy more and more often, since the purpose of walking the streets of Paris was now to serve as bait, and being bait was frightening. Whoever had killed Sleepy and tried to kill Shorty and us would try it again, or so Le Cao Boi told us. That knowledge was somewhat taxing, and the remedy helped to soothe us, or delude us, as we tried to draw out our rival gangsters.

  To say that we walked the streets of Paris, however, was inaccurate. We floated, we glided, but we did not walk as we participated in our rehearsals for the culture show and as we made our round of appointments, delivering our orders to the Vietnamese performers, the Maoist PhD, and to all their friends and acquaintances who preferred their goods delivered by a yellow Asiatic or a fellow Vietnamese rather than a brown Oriental—that is, an Arab. As Ho Chi Minh long ago recognized in his writings against colonialism, the Asiatic and the Arab (as well as the African) were all related as colonial stepchildren sharing the same abusive guardian, France. When it came to the Asiatic and the Arab, we were distant cousins who shared the vast regions that lay to the east of the West, or at least east of the Western mind. The brown Oriental was like the yellow Asiatic in that our once glorious civilizations lay in decayed ruin, only good now for our tea, our religions, our rugs, our trinkets, our tapestries, our textiles, our servitude, our solitude, our sex, and perhaps our rage. Or were our rages and our rants not as good as our goods?

  This circular logic was the Easterner’s way of thinking, versus the Westerner’s linear logic. That linear logic aimed always toward the horizon of Enlightenment, whose perpetual dawn of knowledge was illuminated by the atomic bombs exploding on some poor tropical island of French Polynesia, just beyond the skyline. The closer we came to the source of that luminescence, the more that light hurt our four eyes. With our optical quartet, we preferred twilight. Twilight was the time of hashish, the dusky native, the swarthy subaltern, and the mellow yellow. Twilight was the best time to contemplate the truth, which was usually found in the shadows rather than in stark light. Twilight was also the best time to savor whiskey, make love, foment revolution, and go in circles. We made circles and circles through the neighborhoods of Paris, knowing that somewhere in the vicinity roamed a Citroën CX driven by one of the Seven Dwarfs (for so we thought of them, even if they no longer numbered seven). Le Cao Boi sat in the front and Bon sat in the back with one or two dwarfs, armed with their cleavers as well as knives and pipes and chains and blackjacks and a couple of handguns in case things got really bad.

  That’s it? we had asked.

  Le Cao Boi had shrugged. No need to escalate now, Camus, he said. Just keep talking if you get cornered. We’ll be coming for you.

  Americans in the good old US of A would have cradled shotguns and Tommy guns with the care that mothers reserved for babies. Vietnamese in Vietnam would have been armed with hand grenades and collapsible rocket launchers bought on the black market of American surplus and stolen firepower. But the French—and apparently the natives living in France—were too civilized for any of that. They still believed in starting with revolvers.

  The Citroën trailed us at some distance, discreetly, we assumed, since we saw it only occasionally out of the corner of an eye as we turned into a building or left one. This routine continued for a week, with little result except that our feet got sore and our cash reserves got replenished. Intellectuals really liked hashish, as did some of the bohemians of the Union, who were not such good, law-abiding natives or children of natives that they did not like to get high. And some even bought the remedy, which seemed to them, in all its fine whiteness, rather chic.

  Selling the goods doesn’t offend you? we asked Bon late one night at our new apartment.

  We were drinking cognac the way we sometimes did, using a teapot as our decanter and serving the cognac in thimble-sized teacups. Poor Bon loved cognac and saw no contradiction between imbibing that glorious liquid and saying, The French got rich by stealing from us. Right?

  Right.

  And then they tried to turn us French. They were worse than the Americans. The Americans betrayed us, but at least they didn’t try to turn us into Americans. They never stole anything from us. They just wanted to sell us things. So here, I’m happy to sell the French some things. They owe us.

  We doubted that the French understood our mutual history in that manner, except for the part about turning us French. After all, even as we criticized the French, were we not drinking their cognac? Oh, quelle contradiction!

  We continued to reacquaint ourselves with French perspectives at our morning language classes. We took dictation from the teacher with pleasure and felt once again the thrill of being called on in class, the chance of this little success or failure. On our own time, with the aid of a dictionary, we read Césaire’s A Tempest, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. Césaire gave back to Caliban, “a black slave,” the voice he always had, strong enough to say what every colonized person has wanted to say to his colonizer, in this case Prospero:

  I HATE YOU!

  Prospero’s response was self-serving: “I’ve tried to save you, above all from yourself.” There, the civilizing mission! And then: “I shall set aside my indulgent nature and henceforth I will answer your violence with violence!” There, the cannons of civilization! And blaming the colonized for a situation the colonizer created. Césaire’s vision was like Fanon’s in The Wretched of the Earth, where the violence of the colonizer begat the violence of the colonized. Perhaps that was the only way to get rid of the colonizer, but where did it leave the colonized, infected with the parting gift of the colonizer, the venereal disease of hatred? The triumphant among the formerly colonized would turn this hatred of the colonizer into a barely disguised self-hatred for letting themselves be colonized for so long. They would not take out the self-hatred on themselves;
they would take it out on the rest of the formerly colonized who were not so violent as the victorious. The only solution to this revolution was therefore another revolution, one to which we were committed but whose shape we could not articulate, which was fitting, since our place in this allegory was that of Ariel, the “mulatto slave” of ambiguous loyalty, neither black nor white, a position of weakness that might yet be of some strength if Ariel could finally say something of substance, not having been given much to say by either Shakespeare or Césaire.

  We took unknown words from Césaire, Fanon, and others, composed flash cards in French vocabulary, and turned learning into a drinking game, with Bon drilling us at night and us being forced to take a shot of cognac for every word we missed. “Forced,” of course, is a euphemism with the exact opposite meaning, like “pacification,” which usually involved a great degree of homicidal force on rambunctious natives. History was full of such examples, from the Chinese pacification of Vietnam, which we enjoyed so much that we let it last a thousand years; to the Vietnamese pacification of the Cham, which was so successful that there were barely any Cham left anymore; to the French pacification of Indochina through bringing that religion of peace, Catholicism, which the contemporary French here did not even seem to believe in; to the American pacification of the Mekong Delta, where thousands of “guerrillas” were killed by the Americans but only dozens of weapons were recovered. Where had all their weapons gone? The vanishing was a tropical miracle! But pacification always was.

  At the end of one such vocabulary session, triggered by the expression “coup de foudre,” Bon mentioned seeing Loan a few times. The confession—for that was what it was—stunned us into momentary sobriety with its stroke of lightning. A few times? we demanded. Only a few weeks had passed since he met her at the Union. How do you two even talk?

  I talk. I have things to say.

  You’re supposed to be mute, remember?

  Psychologically mute. Not physically mute.

  We cranked our hanging jaw to a close. You’re saying—

  I’m saying that I told Loan the truth. I was mute not because my vocal cords had been cut in some way, but because I could not bring myself to talk.

  That’s not the truth.

  Spiritually it’s the truth. Have I talked very much over the last few years?

  We shook our head and felt its liquid contents shift and slosh.

  Have I looked at a woman besides the photo of Linh?

  We shook our head again, gently, our mind floating on a waterbed full of cognac.

  It’s been six years since Linh and Duc died. I’ve suffered with them and for them every day. I still suffer. But the night after I met Loan, I heard Linh’s voice. He paused.

  What did she say? we asked.

  It’s time. That’s all. Not time to move on. I can never move on. But it’s time . . .

  We each flung two more shots of cognac down our throats, prefacing every round with a ritual toast that evoked our regular drinking games with Man so many years ago: One hundred percent! We took pleasure in knowing that drinking 100 percent of each shot would have made the French choke on their own cognac. But swallowing whole shots of a noble French liquor in one heroic gesture was a Vietnamese masculine tradition, its origin unknown but most likely arising as a way of demonstrating two things: the first that we, too, could afford cognac, and the second that we were manly enough to drink it very quickly, unlike the French, who only sipped it.

  Riddled by several shots of cognac, Bon then told us more: he had devised a plan for the faceless man, Dung, or whatever his name was.

  What kind of a plan? we said, even though we knew that Bon only ever devised one type of plan.

  The Union invites the entire staff from the communist embassy to come to the Tet show, Bon said. That includes the faceless man. When he shows up, that’s our chance.

  Our chance?

  Or my chance, if you don’t want to be a part of this.

  He went to the closet and retrieved a round blue tin of Danish butter cookies. Was it the same tin offered to us by the Boss? He opened the tin to reveal the sweetest cookie of all, the ultimate male prosthesis, a perpetually hard gun capable of rapid-fire ejaculation. Not a civilized Gallic revolver that could only be fired in slow motion. No, this was a ruthless, Germanic, clip-fed, rapid-fire nine-millimeter Walther P38.

  You’re going to get caught, we said.

  Bon merely smiled. I don’t give a fuck.

  What does not kill you makes you stronger.

  Why the hell not.

  I don’t give a fuck.

  So many eloquent philosophies to choose from! But what was ours? Once it was simply this: Something must be done! Doing something had been the great cause of our life, and we still felt its pressure. In the name of doing something, we had become revolutionary, which had landed us in a reeducation camp. In the name of doing something, we had followed Bon on his suicide mission to invade our homeland and rescue it from communism, just so we could save his life. We had succeeded, barely. And now we had to do something more: we had to stop Bon from killing Man. That was one thing I knew I was still committed to, our oath of blood brotherhood. Of course part of me blamed Man for torturing me, but another part of me saw that he had done what he thought was best for me, to make me see the truth of our revolution. He was locked into the broken world sketched by Fanon and Césaire, where the problem was violence and the solution was violence. We were bound together, not only as blood brothers, but also as revolutionaries who had to pursue our now divergent revolutions to our individual ends.

  Walking the streets of Paris on our delivery routes gave us a great amount of time to puzzle over how to save the life of one blood brother from the hands of another blood brother, as well as to ponder our philosophy, or lack thereof, until the cosmic clock of karma rang. On the day our time came up, Le Cao Boi and Bon were being too discreet, or perhaps too tired and inattentive after days of trailing us. Maybe our circular patterns were too circular, because when Beatles finally appeared, the Citroën was nowhere to be seen.

  Instead of the Citroën, a plain white van pulled up to the curb, passenger-­side window rolled down. The driver was a low-browed fellow we had never seen before, but we recognized the passenger immediately, even if he wore a gray sweatshirt instead of a print of the Fab Four. Before we could run, the side door slid open to reveal two more young men, one middle-browed and one high-browed. The high-browed one aimed a revolver at us and for some reason was smiling, perhaps just to offset the optical heat rays of hatred pulsating from Beatles’s eyes. He spoke rapidly in a stream of French, of which we understood less than half, but this time our lack of comprehension mattered not. The gunman spoke a grammatically perfect English when he translated.

  He said get in or we’ll blow your brains out, the gunman said, still smiling, and it was odd how charming it sounded with its French inflections.

  You speak very good English.

  So do you, he said. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mona Lisa, except for his hair, which was short and curly. But his smile was as serene as her famous one, his nose just as elongated, and his eyes as enigmatic. You speak even better English than Bruce Lee.

  That’s quite a compliment, we said. He was amazing in Fist of Fury.

  Even better in Enter the Dragon.

  What the fuck are you talking about? Beatles yelled.

  He’s a little impatient, the Mona Lisa said, the black caterpillars of his eyebrows arching their backs. His expansive forehead gave them plenty of room. You should get in the car.

  We looked at the small gun in his hand. A small gun implied confidence, accuracy, and grace, unlike a big gun, which in most cases was overkill. We raised our hands, but there was no one on the street to notice the gesture. Then we climbed into the van and squeezed into the middle row between the Mona Lisa and the middle-browed goon, who sm
elled of smoke and sweat. His muscular thigh, pressed against me, jiggled to the strange music playing on the van’s radio, heavy with beats and a staccato black voice enunciating forcefully in English. The van pulled away from the curb, Beatles turned to glare at us from the front seat, and his face was the last thing we saw.

  We, or me, or myself, or I, woke with conversation and laughter echoing in the cracked bell of my head. My neck hurt from holding up the weight of that heavy bell. I was strapped to a wooden chair, hands behind my back, ankles affixed to the legs of the chair, in a cold cellar with gray stone walls lined with industrial-strength wooden shelves, as wide as small beds and stacked with wooden crates. A movie on low volume occupied the face of a television, in front of which a couple of ratty sofas ganged up on a coffee table. Beatles, the Mona Lisa, and the two goons, Ugly and Uglier, were playing cards and smoking cigarettes. My extremities were numb, but the fear clamped on to my spine more than made up for the lack of feeling in my arms and legs. This was not surreal. This was most definitely real. The best-case scenario was that while I might leave this cellar alive, it would only be on condition of having left behind various parts of myself, from fingers and toes to entire limbs, eyes, or ears. The worst-case scenario was that I would leave this cellar dead, although there were various gradations of this scenario, given that I could be dead in one piece, a few pieces, or many pieces.

  Ugly noticed me first and nudged Beatles. Beatles glared at me and lobbed a volley of words that included “bastard,” “asshole,” and “chink.” Each word that I understood and did not understand was a stroke of a hammer against my cracked bell. Echoing there were all the bad words that I had learned in French, including all the anti-Asian racial epithets directed at Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarfs over their years in Paris, which they had passed on to me. Beatles wanted to let me know that he knew these slurs, too, but having endured a lifetime of racial abuse, I pretended not to be bothered and forced myself to laugh. I was the Crazy Bastard. No gangster was going to intimidate me, even if, in fact, he intimidated me. But it would not do to show any dread to this crew. Like all gangsters, lawyers, and priests, they enjoyed the fear of others.