The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  The Mona Lisa groaned, clutched his elbow, and nodded.

  The Boss glanced at the dwarfs again, and Shorty, from the Mona Lisa’s other side, expertly landed his boot in the Mona Lisa’s ribs, thus demonstrating his perfection of that most basic skill of both gangsters and chief executive officers: kicking a man when he’s down. The Boss didn’t hear you! Shorty shouted.

  The Mona Lisa winced, panted, and at last said, Yes, I understand.

  We had now moved to what Claude called the “ultimatum stage.” Unintelligent people, Claude had told his students, the kind who watch television and think it’s real life, believe that if you give a subject the do-or-die test, the subject will do whatever you want or tell you what you want to know, because the subject will not want to die. So let me tell you, from real-world experience, having applied this do-or-die test to many Viet Cong, that a lot of those fuckers will choose to die, and before they die, if they give you any information, it’s most likely bad information. So the only reason to really do the do-or-die test is if you want to kill or inflict a great deal of pain. Capisce?

  Since none of us Vietnamese students knew Italian or had seen the relevant American gangster films where the tough guy says “Capisce?”—not that we could wrap our Vietnamese lips around “capisce”—we could not say that we understood. Only after my years of experience in the Special Branch could I say, based on empirical experience, that I understood. Watching the scene before me now, I could also say that the Boss neither understood nor cared. He was going to kill the Mona Lisa one way or the other, and the only question was whether the Mona Lisa intuited that. The room lapsed into silence as the coffee dripped at the rate of one drop a second, a silence that the Ronin could bear only a half minute before ordering Grumpy to fetch a radio. Grumpy came back with one of the gigantic stereos that I saw being shipped out of the Boss’s import-export store to my homeland, fated to be sold on the black market. Before Grumpy could turn on the stereo, my ghosts started humming and then singing from somewhere behind me:

  Vingt-deux millions de bâtards

  Et moi, et moi, et moi

  Twenty-two million was just a guess on their part. How many bastards walked the world? As for France, if race did not exist, bastards could not also exist, could they? I was perplexed by the conundrum of my existence, by my uneasy citizenship in a diaspora of unknowns. But were I and the millions of bastards like me known unknowns? Or unknown unknowns?

  Ah, that’s more like it! said the Ronin, tuning the station on the stereo. I can dance to this.

  He started to cha-cha, my people’s favorite dance. I, too, could cha-cha to almost anything, at least anything faster than a rosary and slower than the twist. But my feet did not feel like moving. The Boss also did not dance. Neither did the Mona Lisa, nor the dwarfs, nor any of my ghosts, who had edged up from behind me to flank me and invade my personal space. Fascinated, we all watched the Ronin blissfully smiling as he did the cha-cha gracefully with an invisible partner until the Boss said, Enough dancing. The coffee had finished dripping. He rose, hammer in hand, while the Mona Lisa braced his back against the wall.

  The Ronin stopped dancing, smirked, and said to the Mona Lisa, You and your Algerian friends have the right idea. But we Corsicans have been doing this since before you were born. Opium is a better cash crop than rubber, I’ll tell you that. What a wonderful time we had back then in Indochina! May we see the likes of it again, the time when the French government had the good sense to encourage opium. My God, we couldn’t have financed the government without selling opium to the natives! Now that was an effective business model. Vertical integration and horizontal monopolization meant we had total market control. Imagine how much better France would be now if the government was still in the opium business. Our socialist president would have all the money he needs for his fancy welfare programs. Let’s see how long that lasts without enough money to go around. But is anybody going to listen to me? They should! I’m a patriot! Lady Opium was white. But this remedy is so white it’s snow white. Have you enjoyed the remedy?

  The Mona Lisa nodded.

  Then you know what I mean, my friend.

  You ready? the Boss said, looking at me rather than the Ronin.

  I’m always ready, I said, although I had no idea what he was talking about.

  He offered me the hammer, although “offered” was a euphemism, for this was not a gift I could decline. The shaft was smooth wood, no splinters, as long as my forearm, its iron head slightly scarred and scratched, just like mine. Its weight was balanced, unlike me. The hammer extended my body, my arm, my hand, and, ultimately, my mind, at least one of them. I remembered what Professor Hammer once told me about his name and the epigram universally attributed to Bertolt Brecht but really coined by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky or maybe by Leon Trotsky, or so Professor Hammer said: “Art is not a mirror held up to the world but a hammer with which to shape it.” Oh! I had practically orgasmed at hearing this for the first time! Slogans were my turn-on and my political convictions were my most erogenous zone. My name is my destiny, Professor Hammer had said then, raising his glass of sherry to me as I sat in his office for my weekly tutorial with sherry accompaniment, poured from a bottle kept in the professor’s desk drawer, taken out only for his favorite students, who were always men. I could still taste the far-too-sweet sherry as I clutched the Boss’s hammer. Could the professor have imagined that one day I would hold this in my hand and that it would not be a metaphor or a simile but an actual thing with which to hammer an actual head, smash an actual skull, bludgeon an actual brain? I held the hammer with horror, although the horror did not concern the hammer. The hammer was just a tool. I was the weapon and I horrified myself. Everyone was looking at me: the Boss, the Ronin, Grumpy and Shorty, Sonny, the crapulent major, Beatles, Ugly and Uglier, and most especially the Mona Lisa.

  Your interrogation didn’t work, the Boss said. Enough with the words. They didn’t do anything. Now it’s time to do something. But make it last. That’s very important. Pay attention to the details. Me, for example, I like to work up from the toes. How do you want to do it?

  YOU—that is, ME—were once again being examined with the hardest question of all, supposedly posed by Lenin, although really it was the novelist Nikolay Chernyshevsky: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  a) Break the Mona Lisa’s kneecaps

  b) Fracture the Mona Lisa’s ribs

  c) Destroy the Mona Lisa’s nose

  d) Pulverize the Mona Lisa’s hands

  Mayakovsky, Chernyshevsky, Lenin . . . what was wrong with these Russians? Was it Siberia? The steppe? The cheap and plentiful vodka, visually synonymous with water? Or was it that the Russians were essentially Oriental, as Sir Richard Hedd claimed? Did the sum of these things make the Russians prone to brutal behavior, unrealistic expectations, and very thick novels? And, at least by reputation, deadly roulette? The Boss stirred his coffee into a nice caramel blend over ice and, having taken his seat again, sipped it with a slight smile.

  Well, the Boss said, crossing his ankles and relaxing. What are you waiting for?

  The ghosts grinned, snapped their fingers, and sang:

  Trente-trois millions de bâtards

  Et moi, et moi, et moi

  YOU—that is, ME—looked at the Mona Lisa, and even though he grimaced in pain and misery, you could tell he would still rather die from the defiant way he looked back at you. For a moment, you thought about begging God for help, though God would say nothing. No, the only one who had ever guided you unswervingly had been your mother, who always accepted you and who would accept you even if she knew you were a communist or a spy or whatever you were now. You are not half of anything, you are twice of everything!

  The hammer was heavy, even heavier than the bloated foie gras of your guilty conscience, force-fed with all the crimes you had committed. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Grumpy and Shorty regarded you skeptically, finger
ing the cleavers holstered under their arms. The Ronin resumed dancing to the next song on the radio. The Boss studied you as if you were a very bad movie and he was a cineast. You dog-paddled in the waters of your rising panic, seeing no way out of this room or this situation, and since the only thing you could buy was time, you said, Do you have a last request?

  A last request? said Le Cao Boi.

  Well, it’s not a bad idea, said the Ronin, depending on what he asks.

  The Boss sipped his coffee. Make it quick.

  The Mona Lisa made it quick. Give me some more of the remedy.

  Please, said the Boss.

  Please give me some of the remedy.

  A perfect last request! said the Ronin. Because this is going to hurt.

  It’s really going to hurt, said Le Cao Boi.

  You know what I do sometimes? said Shorty. He reached into his brown leather jacket’s inner pocket for a Sony Walkman, headphones attached. Slip these babies on, crank up the volume. It helps. Hearing a guy scream for hours and hours can affect you.

  That reminds me, said Grumpy. He also reached into the inner pocket of his black leather jacket, but in his case removed goggles and a surgical mask. For the blood splatter.

  Ugh, yeah, I remember once I even got a bit of brain—

  Shut up, said the Boss. Give him the remedy.

  You offered the Mona Lisa the remedy. A lot of it. Almost all you had left in your pockets because somehow you were still carrying several packets. You were the magician who kept throwing something away only to discover that it kept reappearing in your pockets, the remedy a white rabbit with a magic of its own. The Mona Lisa inhaled the remedy while the Ronin and Le Cao Boi chuckled, Grumpy and Shorty chortled, the Boss sipped his coffee, and you yourself took the opportunity to snort a white line you withheld from the Mona Lisa. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  You know what this reminds me of? said the Ronin. The monk who burned himself to death in Saigon.

  We’re not going to burn him to death, said the Boss.

  It’s an idea, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that teach the Algerians a lesson? But that’s not what I’m talking about. People all over the world cried over that brave, noble monk. He went out with a real splash, so to speak, even if he did have himself splashed with imported gasoline. The left-wing media did their job, put him all over the news, turned him into a legend. You saw the pictures, didn’t you, my friend? The human torch!

  The Mona Lisa nodded, eyes half hooded.

  Everyone saw the pictures, the Ronin went on. How dramatic! Especially on television. But of course the left-wing media didn’t actually report on the truth. You know what really happened? The commies drugged that poor monk. The reason he was so calm while burning to death was that he was a zombie.

  Bullshit! the Mona Lisa said, eyes now wide open. He was a hero!

  He was a patsy in a communist plot.

  All right, said the Boss, looking at his watch. He wore it with its face on the inside of his wrist, which was probably how Death wore his watch, too. Let’s get this over with.

  Not that you have to make it quick, said the Ronin.

  But the remedy hasn’t kicked in yet, you said.

  I’m getting the feeling you don’t want to do this, said the Boss.

  The dwarfs stopped giggling. Your ghosts hummed, shuffled their feet, sang:

  Quarante millions de bâtards

  Et moi, et moi, et moi

  And suddenly you knew the answer to the question WHAT IS TO BE DONE? The answer had stared you in the face this entire time, always there while you refused to understand it, possibly for your entire life, and at the very least ever since Claude lectured you about the ultimatum stage, the do-or-die test, which, you realized, was what the Boss was administering to you. Like many good answers, this answer was, in retrospect, completely obvious, like the round wheel or the number zero, both of which must have caused people to slap their foreheads and say, Why didn’t I think of that? In your case you overlooked the answer, dismissed or ignored it because it was too terrifying, too straightforward, too simple in what it demanded of you. Now the answer was so deafening it was as if God Himself had finally broken His silence and spoke from the mountaintops and the clouds:

  GOD

  What is to be done?

  ALSO GOD

  Nothing!

  You started to laugh. You finally got it! You had waited so long for God to speak, and when He did, He said, Nothing! Oh my God, God, You’re such a funny guy! The original man with two minds! The greatest stand-up comedian of all time! All the world was a comedy club, and you were the idiot in the front row who kept getting picked on to be the butt of God’s ribbing. Nothing! You shook with sound but no fury, a belly laugh from the same pit where your soul was entombed. Nothing! Ha! Everyone was staring at you now. Was it because you were electrified, every single hair on your body standing and saluting, even the filigrees in your nostrils? Oh my God, God, please, stop! Enough! What a riot! What a scream! And even after slapping yourself on both sides of your face, and with your cheeks stinging, you could hear yourself continuing to laugh hysterically, although it might also be possible that you were just laughing historically.

  The joke, after all, was timeless.

  CHAPTER 18

  What was the difference between history and hysteria, anyway? If you were a woman, you could have a hysterectomy to solve the histrionics of your hysteria, but since you were a man, or so you have been told, the only solution would be a historectomy. The Boss had a much simpler fix. He slapped you in the face, hard and sharp, the way Frenchmen liked to smack their women, the way Vietnamese men enjoyed slapping their women, too. Get a grip on yourself, the Boss said, and though he meant it figuratively, you stopped laughing and clutched yourself, left hand on right biceps, right hand still holding the hammer.

  Get it over with, the Boss said.

  You looked at the Mona Lisa and saw again the face of the communist agent on the examination table in the movie theater, surrounded by the three policemen. Her face had beseeched you and you had done nothing when you should have done something. But now the situation was reversed, and it was, in fact, time to get it over with.

  You offered the Boss his hammer and said, No.

  No? your chorus of ghosts gasped. You have stopped at nothing!

  Le Cao Boi whistled. Oh boy, he said. You’re in a world of shit now.

  What do you mean, no? the Boss said.

  Nothing to be done, you said, paraphrasing, or interpreting, God. I refuse.

  You don’t get to say no, the Boss said. This is not a country club. You can’t just quit your membership and walk away.

  You know too much, the Ronin said regretfully.

  And yet you did not know enough. You did not know whether Marilyn Monroe really committed suicide. You did not know if John F. Kennedy was in fact killed by just one gunman. You did not know if Uncle Ho had possessed a secret wife, as the rumors said. You did not know why Johnny Hallyday was so popular among the French, although you were fairly certain that historians would eventually see that Brigitte Bardot singing Je t’aime . . . moi non plus was the peak of French civilization. You did not know where your mother was now, but by doing nothing you would soon find out.

  Do you know what I’m saying? the Boss demanded.

  I know what you’re saying, you said, mouth completely dry, the bile of fear slathered on your tongue. But do you know what I’m getting at? I have chosen to do . . . nothing.

  And at this you could not help yourself even though you desperately needed to help yourself—you burst out laughing, again, at this gag by a god who did not exist. God had never asked anything to be done, since He had ever and only said nothing—what a howler! What was really a screamer, though, was how so many massacred millions could have been saved if everybody who killed them had just done . . . nothing. If enough p
eople had stood up, or laid down as the case may be, and simply said no, even at the price of their lives, through a mundane act of heroism within everybody’s grasp—

  Don’t you get it? you cried to the Boss, whose lack of a sense of humor would always prevent him from getting the joke. Wasn’t the lack of a sense of humor the greatest lack of all? If only everyone possessed a sense of the absurd, then the world would not be such an absurd place! To the Boss, you said, Don’t you see how much harder it is to do nothing rather than something? But if everybody just did nothing, then nothing would happen!

  Give me that, you crazy bastard, the Boss said, snatching the hammer from your hand. He waved it slowly in front of your face and you almost got cross-eyed following its cobra motion. First, I’m going to show you how to do something. Then I’m going to do something to you.

  The Boss pressed the metallic head of the hammer into your forehead.

  No question about it, Beatles said. This hammer’s hard enough to crush your skull.

  Too bad, Ugly added. It’s going to be messy.

  Very messy, Uglier agreed. That’s why we’re going to love watching this!

  Bon’s not going to like it, said the Ronin.

  All we do is tell him the Arab got loose and killed his friend.

  You couldn’t disagree with the Boss. In his shoes, you would have written the exact same plot. The only positive twist in the tale you could see was that the Boss would have to kill you quickly, one blow to the head, two max, since the Mona Lisa would not realistically have the chance to crush every bone in your body. As the Boss tapped his hammer in his hand and walked toward the Mona Lisa, you rubbed the spot where the Boss had pressed the hammer against your head and probably left a red mark to guide his hand on his return. The taiko drum of your heart pounded, foreshadowing the pounding your head would get as soon as the Boss finished off the Mona Lisa, who was trembling with cold and fear but who did not close his eyes as he looked squarely at his fate. You could not help but admire him. He was, as he had claimed, 100 percent gangster.