Bon coughed. I think we passed the theater a couple of blocks ago.
After you parked the car, you and Bon walked to the theater behind Lana and Loan, who had many questions about Fantasia and its stars. The two of you smoked a cigarette in brotherly silence, each preparing for meeting the faceless man. You had no other ideas, a lack you blamed on having consumed too much of the remedy or not having any of the remedy on hand. Checking your pockets, you discovered that there was still no remedy secretly waiting for you. You began to tremble from all of it, the Champagne, the Guilt and the Shame, the fear of what would happen, the terror of suddenly being a father, the killing of the Boss, and the lack of the remedy. At the theater’s back door, you said goodbye to Lana, who said, Come see me after the show. We have more to talk about. I’m leaving tomorrow for Berlin.
Germany?
The Vietnamese there love us.
She is so nice, a starstruck Loan said as you walked to the front. You’re so lucky. I can’t believe that she—that you—not that she wouldn’t with—well, you know what I mean.
You did indeed know what Loan meant and you took no offense, since you were so revolting that you revolted even yourself. The only ones more offensive than you that night were Angry and Smelly, lurking in the theater lobby.
Where’s the Boss? said Angry.
And Le Cao Boi? added Smelly.
How the fuck do I know? you said. Last I saw him, he had just killed the Algerian. Then I went home.
Hey, said Angry. There’s the Boss’s secretary.
The luscious secretary had arrived for the VIP reception in the lobby, thankfully no longer wearing a see-through nightgown but instead an elegant midnight-blue evening gown with a dead animal draped on her shoulders. On closer inspection, the poor thing turned out to be just a fur.
Hey, said Smelly. Where’s the Boss?
How should I know? said the luscious secretary. Then she looked at you, curled her lip, and hissed, You’re disgusting, you filthy bastard!
Goddamn! said Angry, nudging you as the luscious secretary walked away. She must be having a hell of a period.
Or you did something to her that the Boss won’t like, said Smelly.
Angry and Smelly contemplated you the way butchers inspected barbecued ducks hung by hooks from their anus. So, before matters got worse, you confessed to your fecal faux pas in the Boss’s bathroom, leaving Angry and Smelly howling with laughter until tears squeezed out of their eyes. Filthy bastard, they said, chuckling. Filthy bastard!
What was that all about? Loan said when you joined her and Bon.
She handed you a flute of Champagne and you said, Nothing. How about a toast? To the two of you. And because it was Paris, because it was love, you said, Levons nos verres à l’amour!
Loan’s smile faded even as you and Bon clinked your flutes.
Something wrong? Bon asked, his flute suspended in the air.
Yes, Loan said, pale. He just asked us to raise our glasses to death.
L’amour ou la mort? Love or death? What was the difference? Some say tom-ay-toe, some say tom-ah-toe. It was only a slip of the tongue, or rather, it was your tongue unable, in conjunction with your lips, to mold the crucial word properly. Damn the language of Molière! Always putting words in your mouth that got stuck in your molars, but then again, every language does that. Unfortunately, there was no way to call the whole thing off. Not with Bon’s backup tucked into your waistband backing you up, not with Bon next to you scanning the lobby for the faceless man as more and more excited patrons of Fantasia arrived. Loan had wandered off to chat with friends after the fatal switch you had committed, while you made small talk with the bohemian youth of the Union, who greeted you heartily and then whispered to inquire about the goods. You told them to call you tomorrow, although you had no idea where you would be then, except covered with earth and six feet closer to your mother if the remaining dwarfs found out what happened or if Saïd changed his mind. Meanwhile, you just wanted to enjoy, for a brief moment, the rare sight of harmony in the lobby, as Vietnamese people of all kinds mixed together in joyful anticipation of Fantasia: the liberal to left-wing to outright communist members of the Union, who had been in France two or three generations and tended to be middle class to upper-middle class and above; the conservative to right-wing to outright fascist members of the Association, who were recent refugees and tended to be very poor to somewhat poor to working class; and everyone in between, those on the margins, or the politically uninterested, wanting only to enjoy themselves, which made them the same as just about everybody else on the planet.
It’s the ambassador, Bon said.
The ambassador had the shape of a bowling pin and looked fairly well fed, given that he was representing a starving country where people lived on rations, or so Le Monde and Le Figaro reported. He was with a woman in an ao dai, presumably his wife, and two teenaged children, a boy and a girl, the former in an ill-fitting suit, the latter in an ao dai like her mother. Members of the Union flocked to greet them but also to put a wall between them and the Association’s members, who glared and muttered. I’ll get him, too, Bon said, and you murmured encouragingly. Who were you to get in the way of a man’s dreams and aspirations?
Then it was showtime, with no sign of the faceless man, and you followed Bon into the theater to join Loan.
Everything all right? she said to Bon, ignoring you.
Everything’s fine, Bon said. We were just people-watching.
Programs rustled in people’s laps as they murmured, chattered, and laughed. The curtains were still closed but anticipation was high, for your people had waited months for Fantasia to arrive. The only one disappointed was Bon, although you were relieved, if for the exact same reason: no faceless man. Both of you should have known better.
You had barely taken your seats when someone behind you said, Take a look at that guy, so you did as the man strode down the aisle to your right. He wore a nondescript dark blue suit, an average outfit for an officially underpaid civil servant from a poor country. His wispy hair revealed an underlying parchment of scarred scalp, partly covered by a black band around the back of the head. Bon inhaled sharply as the man paused before the row in which the ambassador sat. When he turned to his left so that he could enter the row, the entire theater saw what the person behind you had glimpsed: not a face but a mask, held in place by the black band. A mask with eyebrows, cheeks, and a broad, but certainly not flat, nose. A mask with lips, as well as holes for eyes that might be ever-so-slightly angled, or tilted, but certainly not slanted. A mask with a face that might have been Asian in its inscrutable features, but that might also have been just human in its unreadable immobility. A mask that was utterly, completely, thoroughly, and indisputably white.
CHAPTER 20
The lights dimmed, the audience cheered, and the curtains opened with the spotlight focused on the one woman onstage, Lana, whose skintight red leather catsuit revealed a body that bore no trace of having been invaded and occupied by a child. The microphone in her hand was a joystick with which she steered the audience, who was carried away by her voice. You recognized the song immediately—“For Your Eyes Only,” from the James Bond movie of the same name, which had been shown for the benefit of the entire refugee camp one evening on Pulau Galang. For refugees who had barely escaped with their lives, a James Bond movie was the escapism they needed. But for you immigrants, refugees, and exiles of Paris, or for your French-born children, the song had a special meaning: Fantasia was for your eyes only. You were not just objects being looked at, you were the subjects looking, your collective gaze concentrated on Lana, whose body embodied everything Vietnamese as she translated the admittedly banal lyrics into your common language. Banal or not, the lyrics spoke a truth about love, both the initial match strike between lovers and the flickering, fluctuating flame of love your people had for each other, complicated and difficult, as all rea
l love was. In this flame you saw not only your beauty but your ugliness, and Lana saw you, all of you, even you in your middling seat, and when she shouted, Good evening, Paris! all of you roared in appreciation, and when she cried, Hello, my dear people! you cheered, whistled, clapped, and stomped your feet, submitting to Fantasia’s greatest fantasy, which was that you had never fought a war against each other, one which you even now were continuing to fight, since the bitterest of wars were civil wars. For a moment, you forgot reality, which was that the people who most hated Vietnamese people were other Vietnamese people. A tragedy, sure, but set it aside, since tonight was for Fantasia, as the next singer sauntering onto the stage reminded you.
It’s Elvis! Loan squealed, clapping her hands.
The wave of hair resembled Elvis Presley’s pompadour, but this was not that Elvis. This figure in black leather pants and a purple velvet smoking jacket with a paisley pocket square and lavender-tinted glasses was your Elvis, named after the King of Rock, a stroke of genius that made all of you wonder why you had not thought of it. And why not take the King’s name? You never allowed anything successful to pass without immediately copying it, whether that was songs, or books, or restaurants, or tyrants, or exploitative and murderous systems of domination, theft, and embezzlement, otherwise known as colonialism, which sounded better when dubbed la mission civilisatrice. Everything sounded better in French, including rape, murder, and pillage! Regardless of the thievery or the homage, this Elvis possessed a hell of a voice, on par with Lana’s, his only fault being that he was a man and not much to look at, but about that nothing can be done. You lean back and their sexy version of his classic “Love You” rolls over you as they cha-cha across the stage. How wise those lyrics are—love you because I hate sadness, love you because I’m sick of people, love you because I’m tired of life. Love you. Love you. Love you. You wish the world was always like a music concert. Mass political or religious gatherings were a crapshoot as to whether attendees left intent on helping strangers or murdering them, but when was the last time music fans had massacred other people at a show’s end?
Fantasia only gets better as it rolls along, with the lights gradually revealing the musicians at the back of the stage. A dozen extremely fit dancers accompany a parade of singers, male and female, who showcase the two most common and delectable emotions in your popular culture, namely love and sadness, with their subtle variations of loss, absence, melancholy, regret, and yearning. The show so overwhelms you that you have actually forgotten about the faceless man when Bon grabs your arm and whispers, He’s leaving. He is silhouetted against the lights of the stage as he makes his way through his row. Now’s our chance, Bon whispers as the faceless man walks up the aisle, and you curse Man’s timing. You and everyone else are utterly entranced by the newest performer onstage, the bewitching and perplexing Alexa, a blond white Québécoise who sings in perfect Vietnamese. You want to stay and figure out how a white woman has pulled off this magic trick, but Bon whispers something to Loan, then pushes you until you rise and the two of you stumble over the feet of the others in your row.
Outside the theater, you catch a glimpse of the back of the faceless man as he turns a corner in the lobby, passing by an astonished Angry, smoking a cigarette.
He’s going to the bathroom, Bon says, striding by you, hand under his jacket, touching his gun.
You can feel Bon’s backup in the small of your back as you follow, and the joy and happiness of your few minutes with Fantasia turn into smoke, leaving only a dread lump of coal in your gut.
Who the hell was that? says Angry. What are you guys doing?
Tell you later, says Bon.
The two of you turn the corner just in time to see the door to the men’s room close, and Bon asks if you are ready without looking at you. The question is rhetorical. He assumes you must be ready and he does not care if you are not, for he is now a heat-seeking missile. You and he cover the ground to the door in a few seconds, and as you do, he slips out his gun, racks the slide, and uses his left hand to push open the door while he raises the gun with his right. He moves so quickly that when he stops abruptly, you run into him and knock him aside, revealing the faceless man, back against the wall, facing the door, hands by his side, mask still on his face.
What took you so long? the faceless man says. I’ve been waiting for you.
Delights of Asia is shuttered, but nobody on rue de Belleville notices even though it is prime time on a Saturday night, for no loyal customers exist to be disappointed. You drove Bon and the faceless man here, the two of them in the back seat with Bon aiming his gun at the faceless man. He had offered no resistance in the men’s room or on the walk out of the theater past the still-smoking, still-perplexed Angry, who again said, Who the hell is this guy? You drove without musical accompaniment, the better to hear what the faceless man said, sentences that might earn you a bullet in the back of your head. But in the car, the faceless man did not reveal his name or who he really was. Nor did Bon ask, because Bon thought he knew who the faceless man was: the commissar, the political officer of the reeducation camp charged with administering your ideological laxative and purging you of all the remnants of colonization in your colon, followed by making you over as communists in the image of Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh (but not Mao, for your triumphant revolutionary regime, having kicked out the French and the Americans with a little help from the Chinese, was now free to hate the Chinese once again). Even among the camp guards and the camp commandant, the commissar was only known as the commissar. So this is what Bon called him, Commissar, hissing out the word, which appeared to bother the faceless man not at all.
Why the mask, Commissar? were the first words Bon said once you were in the Boss’s brute, the three of you having walked in silence from the theater. You watched the scene in the rearview mirror, Bon staring at the faceless man’s mask, the faceless man orienting his gaze so that he could see both Bon, next to him, and you, in the driver’s seat. The faceless man laughed, or made some sound approximating laughter, for whatever noises he made were slightly muffled by the mask and distorted by his scarred throat. You remembered from your interrogation sessions with the commissar in the camp that he no longer sounded like Man, which—along with his missing face—meant Bon did not recognize him.
Don’t you like me better with a mask?
I don’t like you at all, mask or no mask. Why are you here?
Paris is my reward for being a hero of the state, the faceless man said in his raspy voice. Funny, after having thrown out our colonizers, how we like to take vacations among them. I process visas in a back office, so no one has to see me. Very painless and easy, except for the boredom. But the real reason to be here are the excellent plastic surgeons. In this and other ways, the French have tried to be helpful in the postwar years.
Why would they do that?
Guilt? It’s easier for the French to feel guilty now, because they can point to the Americans and say they did much worse. Also, you don’t know how much the French enjoy hearing our diplomats celebrate defeating the Americans in perfect French! The faceless man laughed, and it was a horrible sound. Hearing us speak fluent French makes them believe we boys have finally become men.
And the plastic surgeons?
They offered to do it for free. The faceless man laughed again even though nothing was funny. The French enslaved us, but of course not all the French are responsible. The same colonizing class that exploited us exploit the French people too. At least these surgeons are human like us.
Human? You’re not human. You’re a monster. Let’s see your face then, or what’s left of it. All that time in the camp, I never got a real close look at you.
Oh, not yet. The faceless man laughed. He was apparently having the time of his life. The light is not good here. A monster needs excellent light.
The light is also not good in front of Delights of Asia, and this may account for what Bon
does not notice as he approaches the shutters with a key. You enter, and the stage is now set. The actors are in place, the plot moves through the maze to its inevitable end, the script already written. And who is the scriptwriter but you? Still, as the person penning this scenario, you are only partly in control, for you are not the producer of what is clearly a black comedy, even if calling a comedy black is kind of, sort of, maybe, perhaps, residually racist, although if you suggested that to a Frenchman, or even to an American, and most probably to a Vietnamese, he would indignantly denounce you as racist for seeing something racial in an innocent use of the word “black.” Just a coincidence! Nothing to do with black markets, or blackface, or how the French, in a really wonderful turn of phrase, call ghostwriters nègres—niggers!—the sheer bravado of it taking your breath away when you heard it for the first time. But why take offense over a playful use of words, when it really was the case that ghostwriters were just slaves, minus the whipping, raping, lynching, lifetime servitude, and free labor? Still—what the hell?—if words are just words, then let’s call it a white comedy, shall we? It’s just a joke, take it easy, a bad joke, sure, but so was the Unholy Trinity of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, not to mention the Dynamic Duo of capitalism and communism, both of which white people invented and which were contagious, like smallpox and syphilis. White people have gotten over those bad jokes, haven’t they? In any case, all wordplay aside, this really is a white comedy, for the real producers are white, the colonizers and the capitalists who long ago financed this epic production of which your bit is not even on the main stage. Oh, no, to add insult to injury—because insult is always added to injury—you are off-off-off-off-off-Broadway, on a sideshow of a sideshow of a sideshow, molesting Molière’s horrified ghost, in an intimate theater of the absurd so cutting edge, so avant-garde, so far ahead of the masses that there are not even any spectators! Except for you three watching yourselves, the CAST:
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