CHAPTER 10
The ringing in my head reminded me of the ringing of the bell in my father’s church. The sound of that bell, imported from France, boomeranged across all the years to return to me in this obscure, moist French cellar. It seemed to me that I heard my father speaking to me, too, the word he used for me coalescing from the echoing within my cracked bell: You! Somebody was ringing my bell, which is to say somebody was slapping me in the face. Each blow lit up the insides of my closed eyelids, showering them with yellow and red sparks.
HEY!
YOU!
The you that was me opened my eyes. I was not in my mother’s hut. I was not in my village. I was not in my father’s church. I was still on that wet cellar floor, and the hand slapping my face belonged not to God but one of the two goons. Ugly. Or maybe it was Uglier.
That got his attention, the Mona Lisa said, squatting by my side. He’s awake now. Got some color in his cheeks.
Why don’t you put up a fight? said the goon who had been slapping me. My eyes focused. It was definitely Ugly. Where’s the fun if we don’t get to torture you?
This is boring, Uglier said.
Can’t we just kill him now? asked Ugly.
Shut up! Beatles said. He was pacing behind the Mona Lisa. You lazy-ass little shits. You can’t even beat somebody up without complaining about it.
Okay, Ugly said. Fine. But my toes are hurting.
I guess kicking somebody with your sneakers wasn’t a good idea, Beatles said. Get some boots.
Ugly sighed and stood up, presumably to kick me again, but just as he was drawing back his leg, the Mona Lisa raised his hand.
I have an idea, he said. The Mona Lisa knelt on one knee before me, and for the first time I noticed that he was wearing my Bruno Magli shoes. He noticed that I noticed and said, These very nice shoes are wasted on you. Now, are you ready to play a game?
I’d rather not, I said, but either I did not say it, or I said it so softly that only I heard, or I said it and no one cared, for everyone ignored me. The Mona Lisa drew a revolver from his waistband, aimed the gun at me, and slowly moved it closer and closer until the muzzle was pressed against my forehead. Then he drew the gun back, snapped open its cylinder, shook out six bullets, and cupped them in his palm.
Look at that, he said.
I could not look at anything else.
He dropped a bullet onto the cement floor and it bounced with a metallic ping in front of my nose.
Such a small thing, the crapulent major whispered in my ear. But it’s big enough to smash through your skull. I should know, shouldn’t I?
I’m sorry, I said to the crapulent major. I’m so sorry.
You should be sorry, said the Mona Lisa. He dropped a second bullet onto the floor, where it bounced in a different direction and ended up near my eye. But you’re going to be sorrier still.
Where’s my apology? whispered Sonny in my other ear as the third bullet hit the floor. In my case, you actually pulled the trigger. I would have appreciated it if you could have been a better shot and killed me with one bullet instead of the six bullets you actually used.
I’m sorry, I said to Sonny. I’m so sorry.
I heard you the first time, the Mona Lisa said, dropping the fourth bullet. Say it all you want, being sorry is not going to save you now.
He dropped the fifth bullet. It fell in slow motion and I was able to study it in all its splendor as it descended. This particular beauty was jacketed in a copper that reflected the light in such a way that the bullet appeared to wink at me as it fell, graceful as an Olympic diver. The tip of the bullet was a dull orange. I was sure it was a soft-nosed bullet, an ironic term, since the purpose of the bullet was not to be soft but to inflict great damage when the tip expanded on contact, namely with me and myself. When the fifth bullet finally hit the floor and bounced, I wondered why I had never apologized to these two men whom I had killed.
We wondered that, too, they said.
I didn’t think you would want an apology from me, I said.
Of course we want an apology from you, the Mona Lisa said, holding the sixth bullet between his thumb and forefinger. Not that it’s going to do you any good, but it’s good form to apologize when you have fucked up. Especially when you have fucked up as much as you have. You do realize you are in deep shit now, right?
He placed the bullet above a chamber of the cylinder and let it hover there. Then he slowly inserted the shaft of the bullet into the chamber waiting to receive it. I had a great deal of time to study the bullet with my name on it. That was an expression I had learned from Claude. You can’t dodge a bullet with your name on it, he would say. In this case, there was literally no name on the blank bullet, which for me, VO DANH, was perfect. Baptizing myself as ANONYMOUS was my little joke on French bureaucracy, because if one could not level a joke at the bureaucracy, one would keel over and die of ennui, which would be endlessly preferable to how I was about to die.
I had not blinked for the entire timeless time that the Mona Lisa had been dropping bullets on the floor, and now my dry eyes forced me to blink, and in the blink of an eye the Mona Lisa snapped the cylinder shut, sealing my fate. He spun the cylinder once, twice, three times.
You Vietnamese like to play Russian roulette, don’t you? he said. I saw it in a movie once. Are you ready to show us how good you are at that game?
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I said, sobbing.
Too late now, said the Mona Lisa. Sit up.
Sit up, I told myself, but myself was nowhere to be found. I was immobilized, even after Beatles slapped me a few more times. Ugly and Uglier had to be called in to pull me up by my arms and prop me on a sofa.
I’ve been very patient with you, said the Mona Lisa. He put the gun into my hand. Now either you play the game or we’ll make it even more painful for you if you don’t play the game.
A lose-lose scenario was a fitting scenario for a man with two faces and two minds. No matter which way the coin landed, which face showed, the result would be bad. Theoretically that made the choice easier than a win-or-lose scenario, since there was no way to change the outcome. Even so, nobody in his right mind would play Russian roulette.
You! Beatles slapped me in the face so hard that I saw double. Hey, you! Are you going to play the game?
I was not crazy enough to play the game! But YOU were, you crazy bastard. I saw you pick up the revolver with my hand, moving in slow motion. Ever so languorously, you raised the gun and you saw that Ugly and Uglier both had their guns aimed at you, which included me, just in case you were inspired to theatrical heroics. But you have never been a hero. You have just been a survivor and a believer who sincerely wanted to do what needed to be done. And what needed to be done now was to get things over with as soon as possible. In a lose-lose scenario, what was the point in dragging things out?
Click!
I can’t believe it! YOU did it! YOU pulled the trigger! The whole world was silent after the click of the hammer. The Mona Lisa was saying something, but while his mouth was moving, we could not hear a thing, except for the turning of the gears in our head, grinding away uselessly since there was a screw missing. The odds were on your side, one out of six, or, looked at another way, five against one. Math was never your strong suit, ever since YOU were born as half of one whose other half was ME. History was the subject that caught your interest, and here history is getting in the way of humanity. You and these gangsters, who are the sons of mothers perhaps like yours and mine, have been brought here to this moment by history. And some very bad choices.
Although you share a predilection for bad choices with Ugly, Uglier, and Beatles, you find it hard to sympathize with them for they seem to be howling with laughter, judging from the movements of their mouths and their facial expressions, the way the pirates howled as they approached your boat. I had forgotten about that, or
at least I have tried not to think about it. Sympathy is my talent, not memory. I even feel sympathy for these gangsters who are placing bets on which bullet will do us in. But memory must be your talent. You have not forgotten. Your life is always waiting for YOU and ME, your memories always loaded and ready to be fired into my brain. Most of the time, the barrel is empty in this game of demonic mnemonics. Most of the time.
Click!
YOU did it again! YOU pulled the trigger! Now I am getting a little nervous. About as nervous as when we all realized that at last, at last, another boat had stopped for us on the open sea, but alas, alas, they were pirates. We were still dazed from surviving the storm of the day before when the pirates clambered aboard, reeking of stale sweat, bad booze, and worse intentions, wielding knives, pipes, chains, axes, and a few AK-47s to seal the deal. You are sure that there are many kind and decent Thai people, but this is the unfortunate sampling we met. The women on the boat screamed as the pirates stripped them and everyone of anything worth anything. Then the women braced themselves to be stripped by the pirates, who were distant cousins, in a way, of these gangsters surrounding you, poking and prodding, asking you something you cannot hear, and when you do not respond, slapping you, once, twice, three times. Oh, I’m so glad I’m not YOU!
Of course, things didn’t turn out so bad on the boat. For us, anyway. Or for the women. Who knew these pirates were of the most peculiar kind? Everybody had heard stories of the kidnapping and raping of girls and women on these refugee boats. But no one had heard of this, a crew of unwashed pirates bypassing the young and nubile females, shivering in their thin blouses, doing their best to shrink and appear unattractive. I won’t let you take my sister! cried the noble young man next to you. You’ll have to kill me first! Oh, how those pirates laughed! Oh, how those pirates fell all over themselves, slapping each other on the backs! Oh, how they bellowed at all of us in their own language, which none of us could understand! But the meaning suddenly became clear when the skinniest of the pirates sauntered up to our young man and, ignoring his teenage sister altogether, ran his grotesque finger over the young man’s chapped lips and then seized him by the hair and dragged him and not his sister to the other boat.
Confusion! Pandemonium! Chaos! No one could quite believe what they were seeing, as the leering pirates grabbed a few more of the slimmest, most hairless young men and boys. What were those monsters doing? Were they taking the young men and boys to be pirate apprentices? Were they kidnapping them to be sold as slave labor? Could they possibly—could they—no—
CLICK!
You—stop! Right now. Stop crying and for God’s sake stop pulling that trigger! You’re hysterical! I am not doing too well, either, I must admit. Who cares if Beatles is screaming at you and slapping you? You have to stop being the hysteric of history! So what about your mother and father, about your birth, about being a bastard, about your subterranean life as a spy, about the war, about the reeducation camp, about the faceless man, about the refugee boat, about being so ugly that the pirate captain took one look at you and said, in the broken English he must have picked up from the American soldiers who came to his country on vacation from your war, seeking some highly affordable number one boom-boom, You look like shit!
Well, he was not wrong, was he? Of course YOU looked like shit, after having been digested through the circuitous intestines of Hell. What do you think I looked like? You once said that your liver was the most abused part of your body. Correction: I am the most abused part! Even if, technically speaking, as your conscience and your conscious, I am not part of your body. But where your body ends and your mind or my mind begins, who knows? What I know is: Get over it! Move on! Forget! The past is past and the future lasts forever and the present is always here and yet gone. So I need you to feel sympathy with me, which is to say, YOU—
CLICK!
NO! Are you crazy? Wait, I take that back. Yes, you are crazy! With good reason, perhaps, but that’s no excuse. That’s four tries and two more chambers. We are pushing our luck. Let me be the voice of reason here. I encourage you to give them what they want. They just want to know where the Boss is. Just by giving up the Boss doesn’t mean you’re giving up Bon—
CLICK!
Jesus Christ! Holy shit! Who told you to do that, you crazy bastard? Are you not listening to what I’m saying to you? I’ve got a stake in this, too, motherfucker!
Okay, all right, excuse the outburst, but now that we’ve clarified matters, the choice is quite obvious, one hundred percent obvious in fact, let’s calm down, stop shaking, put that gun down, no matter what Sonny and the crapulent major are telling you right now about how this gun in your hand bears quite a resemblance to the one that Bon used to kill the crapulent major, they are by definition highly biased individuals in that they would love to see you dead, so don’t listen to them, YOU have to realize that even though you’ve been through hell, and you’re crazy, and you look like shit, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a good life, you’re still young, barely middle-aged if we assume we will live to a ripe old age, and why not, the future looks bright, you just got to get through this rough patch here, Bon can take care of himself. Stop laughing! Why are you laughing? This is not a joke! Don’t—
CLICK!
HẾT
FIN
THE
END
Part Three
I
CHAPTER 11
I was finished.
Or was I?
I was done.
But was I?
It was over.
Then again, maybe not . . .
Who was laughing?
It wasn’t me.
It was YOU!
Wasn’t it?
YOU couldn’t be laughing with ME, since I wasn’t laughing. That must mean YOU were laughing at ME, and why not? What a sight I was. I looked at myself holding the gun in my hand and wondered how it had gotten there since YOU were the one holding it. Everything was shaking so much I could not tell if my hand was trembling or if my eyeballs were rattling in my skull. We will live! That was the punch line of the joke, wasn’t it? The joke was always on us, because God was a bastard. It must have been a very funny joke because the initially befuddled gangsters were laughing, the Mona Lisa having magically produced the sixth bullet, the one with my name on it, VO DANH. But I had dodged that bullet not because he had removed it from the revolver before the game, or never even inserted the bullet into its chamber in the first place. I had dodged that bullet because he did not know that VO DANH simply meant “nameless.” A man with no name could not be killed by a bullet with his name on it! The joke was on him, not me!
Why’s he laughing? Ugly said.
He’s one crazy bastard, Beatles said.
How long you been practicing that trick? Uglier asked.
Ever since I watched that Vietnam War movie, said the Mona Lisa, wiping tears from his eyes as he got up. I got to take a leak. Over his shoulder, before he went up the stairs, he said to me, I like that look of agony on your face. Because I know it’s true.
Let’s do that again, said Ugly.
Do you want to do it again? said Beatles.
It doesn’t matter, I—or we—said, laughing. We will live!
What? said Beatles.
We will live, we—or I—said.
You crazy bastard! Who is Le Chinois?
I laughed again, for now I understood that the sobriquet was not an insult after all. No, no, no! It was a joke. Me! I said. I am Le Chinois.
You?
Yes, me! We are all Le Chinois!
Ugly, Uglier, and Beatles looked at one another dubiously.
Each and every one of us! The guy at the pan-Asian deli making you Asian food that no Asian will eat; the girl to whom you say ni hao! and whom you will then curse for being so unfriendly as not to say ni hao! back even though she is not actually Chin
ese; the ones whose names you cannot remember or pronounce or spell correctly no matter how many times you see or hear them; the ones whose origins you cannot tell and whom you therefore call—
You are one annoying—
—Le Chinois! I am the infamous criminal you call by that name and I am the famous cop you also call by that name; I am the one whom you do not want for a neighbor, but if you had to have a neighbor who is not white—not that you notice such a thing, since you are color-blind—then I am the one you want; I am the one you consult when you want to learn anything about my culture; I am the one who is not willing to give up my culture; I am the one whom you are always asking where I am from, no, where I am really from, even if that question should be asked of everyone, and the only answer that should matter is that I, like you, am from my mother, but if you must insist on asking where I am truly from, even if we are all supposed to be the same, even if we are all supposed to be French, even if some of my ancestors died fighting in your wars for your armies, even if my parents were born here, even if my grandparents were born here, even if the answer is that I am from here, or, in my unique case, that I am from Hell—
What’s that crazy bastard saying—
—then I am from the one and only original Le Chinois—
Whatever I was going to say next, and in what language, I have forgotten, for I had just realized that I had given my speech in a mixture of French and Vietnamese and English when the door to the stairway slammed open and Le Cao Boi slid down the handrail by the seat of his pants, sunglasses shielding his eyes, toothpick in his mouth, automatic pistols in both hands—bang! bang! bang!—and behind him was the Ronin in a shiny green double-breasted suit with the collar of his silk shirt open to the sternum and with a pump-action shotgun—bang! bang! bang!—and following him was Bon, crouching at the top of the stairs and bracing a submachine gun on his knee to provide cover fire—bang! bang! bang!—and it was awfully loud in the cellar, the screaming and shouting and cursing not helping matters, and I reached over and picked up the barely lit cigarette in the ashtray that Beatles had been smoking—bang! bang! bang!—and it felt so good after having been deprived of my addiction, the pleasure not ruined even when Beatles was knocked back onto the coffee table by the impact of several bullets, the gelatinous mush of his brains looking like all the brains I had ever seen because we are all human, and why couldn’t we just get along—bang! bang! bang!—and I looked down at his lifeless eyes, the half-empty cup of his shattered head resting on the edge of the coffee table near my knee, and I wept for him because if I had been him, born in his place, living his life, I might have done the same heinous things he had done, even to me—bang! bang! bang!—and Ugly and Uglier were gushing blood, too, and their blood was not white or yellow or black or brown but red, deep red, even purple, and no matter what we looked like on the outside we all looked the same when turned inside out, and somewhere soon their mothers would worry when they did not come home and their worrying would never cease, it would remain with them, as they would forever feel the laconic presence of their ghostly sons, whom they would at last meet on the other side after the bittersweet moment of their own deaths, the ones they feared and longed for, as death would be the only ticket to a reunion with their loved ones—bang! bang! bang!—and if Ugly and Uglier were not yet dead they were dead now, after the Ronin took out a revolver from underneath his jacket and gave each one the final blessing of the coup de grâce. Bang! Bang! Bang!
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