Bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit!
Then tell us what happened.
Yes, tell us what happened, the kind old gentleman says.
What did you want Bon to do?
You can still see the barrel of Bon’s gun aimed at you. There is no light at the end of its short tunnel, just a bullet with your name on it, because Bon actually knows all your names, from your birth name to your baptismal name, Joseph. This is the name you used with Loan, pairing it with a surname not your own, Nguyen—Nguyen! Nguyen! Nguyen! The name of literally millions of people, you French bastards! Get it right!—to make you Joseph Nguyen. Your cover would have fallen apart if Lana, once contacted by the French police, had told the truth and said what your real name was. But your cover held up because Lana, for whatever reason, had covered for you. Could it be—love? You shudder at such a blasphemy as someone loving you, just as you shudder at being named after the most famous cuckold in Christian history. Your baptismal name is apt, for God, if He exists, has fucked you over many times. This final rendezvous with your blood brothers is only further proof of His unholy delight as you hear Bon ask, in his strangled voice, Do it?
Don’t feel bad, Bon, you say. Do it. It has to be done.
Yes, we know, says the lawyer. You wrote it in your confession.
You adjust your sunglasses and look above her at the picture of the trio pinned to the wall. Isn’t it funny?
I don’t see what’s so funny about it.
Of course you don’t. I mean, isn’t it funny how they’re wearing white masks?
I was there for that march. Those are yellow masks.
Yellow—You burst out laughing. Yellow masks! Who can tell, in a black-and-white photograph, whether something or somebody is yellow? Or rather, in a black-and-white photograph, yellow can only appear to be white. I want one of those yellow masks, you say. Man only left me with his white mask. I’ll make you a deal. You bring me a mask, I’ll take off these sunglasses.
The lawyer looks at the mask hung above your bed. I can arrange for a yellow mask, she says. But you keep dodging my question. Just like you dodged the bullet.
Dodged the bullet? Have you seen the holes in my head?
There are no holes in your head.
I can put my fingers right on them. See?
What did Bon do after you told him that something must be done?
Do you know my greatest talent?
To see any issue from both sides?
Yes! You are a close reader! Even there, in Delights of Asia, with my best friend and blood brother aiming his gun at me, I could see the issue from both sides, even though any normal person would see the issue from only the side of self-preservation. Any normal person would have begged for his life, pleading with Bon to remember our childhood, our blood brotherhood, our oath, sacrificing all dignity and self-consciousness, as if life were the most important thing of all. But life is not the most important thing. Principles are. Bon knew that very well, as do I. We are both men of unswerving principles! And so, when I told him to do it, I knew what I was telling him to do. To follow through. Now, to answer your question, I must do what I do best, which is to look right into his head and see from his point of view, which means to see me through his eyes, since he was looking at me as well as at Man. Man was watching the entire time in case you need an eyewitness, although I don’t know why you would, given that I am perfectly capable of saying to myself, J’accuse! Accused, accursed, I stand before you, my handsome and humorless lawyer, as I stood before Bon, who saw me exactly as I was. What was I? Not his bête noire! There was nothing black about me! No, I was his bête blanche, a communist, a traitor! How he looked upon me with such horror! My appearance appalling, my true face hideous, I was no longer his friend—I was a monster!
Now came his greatest test, the one that happens for all of us, when our thesis and antithesis collide. Our actions then reveal us for who we truly are. On the one hand, his oath to me, his blood brother. On the other hand, his oath to killing his enemies. And there I stood before him, both in one, blood brother and mortal enemy. How would he resolve this contradiction between love and hate, friendship and betrayal? I believed the answer was simple. I believed there was only one solution. How I misjudged! How I did not understand Bon! How I actually couldn’t see the world through his eyes until now! Now I can feel the weight of the gun in his hand as well as the weight of his decision. I will kill him, he thought. I have to kill him, the son of a bitch, the motherfucker, the bastard! He’s a communist! A traitor! I have killed so many, this one will be easy. He’s standing five feet away and I cannot miss, especially given how big his head is, how high that forehead to which so many of our teachers pointed as a sign of his intelligence. I was always the stupid one. Smart enough to get a scholarship, but in Saigon I learned that the smartest village boy was still a bumpkin compared with a city boy. I left the academics and wordplay to them. I couldn’t beat them when it came to books. Where I beat them was on the fields, with my body. I outran, outfought, outshot them. Leave it to the smart guys like him to beat the communists with words and ideas. I’ll stick to killing communists.
Even before I came to the lycée, I’d already killed my first communist. He was the rat who betrayed my father to the communist infiltrators as the head of the village. The communists made my father kneel in the middle of the village, made my mother and me and all my brothers and sisters watch from the front row. We wept and cried, saying, Ba, Ba, Ba, over and over, begging the communists not to harm our father, all while Ba did not cry or scream or beg at all. He knew he was going to die, and he gave us the greatest gift he could. He showed us we must face everything with strength and dignity, even our own end. He showed us that principles matter more than life. His last words to me were, Con oi! Obey your mother and take care of her, con oi! Don’t make her life hard, which he said while they tied his hands behind his back and denounced him. They told him to confess and he said, Confess to whom? You’re not my priest. So they hung a sign around his neck that said PUPPET. And when they fired a bullet into his head, he fell, his strings cut. I screamed so loud I can hear it now, twenty-eight years later:
BA OI!!!
BA OI!!!
BA OI!!!
But no matter how hard I screamed, no matter how much I shook him or hugged him, he would not get up. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. His mouth was open, but he said nothing. His blood was on my face, my shirt, my hands. His brains were spilling out of his head and I can feel them even now, soft and slippery in my hands. Ba oi, Ba oi, Ba oi . . . I would never scream that way again until Linh and Duc died.
God! Why have You done this to me?
God! Why have You taken away those whom I loved with every part of myself?
God! Why have You made it so hard for me to believe in You?
God! Why have You turned my blood brother into the devil?
God! What do You want me to do that I haven’t already done for You?
I try to understand, God. You tested my father, and he passed. He now sits at Your feet in Heaven, looking down on me, with Linh and Duc at his side. I try to understand, God, and perhaps what I understand is that I may never join my father, my wife, and my son in Heaven. I have killed so many communists, and while they all deserved to die, and while my priests have absolved me, I understand that perhaps You may not, which is why You insist on punishing me eternally. But why punish me, God, when I love You, when You have given me this talent to kill so many of these godless communists who hate You? God, I sacrificed them for You!
I remember very well that first communist I killed. I planned for killing that rat from the moment my father died. That was why I saved the rope used to bind my father’s hands. I was only ten. I had to wait and prepare myself. I ran until I was the fastest in the village. I worked the fields until I was the strongest among the boys, and I wrestled until no boy could beat me. And
I wasn’t going to be some common soldier, because common soldiers couldn’t kill that many communists. So I studied hard to get out of the village and become an officer someday and command men and kill many, many communists. And the night before I left for Saigon and the lycée, I waited in hiding for the rat, whom I had been watching for four years. I knew his routine, his path from house to outhouse, and late one evening when he passed by, I sprang out of the thicket, wrapped the rope that bound my father around the rat’s neck, and dragged him into the thicket. He didn’t scream. Just gurgled, then died, and I dragged his body to the river and tied him to a sack of rocks with that rope and threw him in. And I regret nothing.
Can You forgive me for that, God?
And for what I must now do?
Why do I hesitate?
The barrel is aimed squarely between his eyes. I cannot miss. I have never missed at this range. But why am I more afraid than him? The crazy bastard looks happy, like he wants it. I can see every detail of his face, and I recognize every detail, unlike with Man, whose half-human face I cannot recognize at all. I will kill him, too, as soon as I—
But I can see every detail . . .
And I can see beneath the details . . .
I see not only his face now but the face he once wore, when we were fourteen, just boys. And on that young boy’s face, I see the future, although what I cannot see is his fate, and mine. What I see instead are hope, idealism, love, brotherhood, sincerity, and pain as he slices his palm and swears his oath. To us. I can still feel the stickiness and the slipperiness of his blood on my stinging palm, mingling with my blood as we grasp each other’s hands and become one. Oh, God! My God . . . forgive me.
Those were the days when we were young, and innocent, and pure.
Epilogue
Tu
The bullet shattered Bon’s head and blew pieces of it all over the restaurant, then ricocheted off a wall, bounced off the floor, and pierced your temple, or perhaps it was your crown, leaving this second hole that will now not stop leaking. You screamed, and some part of you has not stopped screaming since, even though you are dead. You ran to Bon, who had collapsed as his father must have, doing nothing to break his fall, shattered head smashing against the tiled floor with a sickening crack, which echoed something breaking inside of you. Oh my God, you cried, even though you don’t believe in God.
You knelt before Bon with your hands hovering over him, not touching him, not wanting to hurt him, and not knowing how to help him. His eyes were open, his mouth open, and you could see right into his head. There was nothing you could do. There’s nothing we can do, Man said, kneeling next to you, his knees in the blood spilling from Bon’s head.
But there must be something, you said, or screamed. Call an ambulance!
Bon is dead.
When you told Bon that he had to do it, that he knew what had to be done, this was not what you meant. How could he not understand? Wasn’t it obvious that he was supposed to kill you, not himself?
Bon is dead.
How can he be dead when you have written about him over so many pages, over two volumes of your confessions? You have read and reread your confessions, and in them Bon is alive, still alive, forever alive. He must live! This is how you have kept him away from the shade of death and in the light, until now.
Bon is dead.
Call an ambulance!
What will we do when the police show up? How do we explain this mess?
Mess? This is Bon!
Bon’s dead. And there is nothing we can do to bring him back.
But are your confessions merely nothing? You have written more than seven hundred pages. Who knew your life warranted this many words, you, a nobody who believes in nothing? But then again, most people are nobodies. Most of these nobodies may believe in God, but they are not so different from you. They also believe in nothing, except that they refuse to admit it. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is everywhere, just like God, for whom nothing is only another name. Nothing can bring back the dead, who come from nothing and return to nothing. No, nothing can be done, except for this, the words you have written, your only remedy, the thing to which you are the most committed.
Now you are done. You have given the handsome and humorless lawyer what she wants, the final piece of evidence in the case for you or against you, depending on one’s point of view. You have also given the Maoist psychoanalyst with a PhD what he wants, not so much a case to defend or to prosecute, but a case study to analyze. Although this was not actually a confession, he said on his last visit.
Oh, no? What is it then?
A suicide note, he said with great satisfaction. The longest suicide note in history.
And you laughed and laughed and laughed. A suicide note! You didn’t think he had such a great sense of humor! You have committed to many things, and you have committed many things, but you have not yet committed suicide. Could a dead man commit suicide? That would take some real commitment, but are you not among the most committed men who ever lived?
Adorno wrote that we should be wary of committed writers, the Maoist PhD said. They are always committed to power.
Adorno! You hadn’t heard his name since Professor Hammer’s seminar, where you read his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in one of the most unenlightened places on earth, Los Angeles, where you, like them, had been exiled, in their case from Nazi Germany. As thinkers and writers, they likely believed that power indeed comes from the barrel of a pen, perhaps even more than the barrel of a gun. While the colonizers, the capitalists, and the communists have slaughtered millions with their guns, were they not ultimately, in the last instance, driven by words, by ideas that flowed in the ink of the great philosophers, or sometimes just the demonic demagogues? You press the barrel of your pen against your temple and you cannot count the number of pens that you have gone through in writing your confession, all those spent cartridges of your favorite color, black, as indelible as squid ink, as dark as your interior, and the kind old gentleman, who had been watching and listening as always, said with the greatest of kindness, I think you must be mad.
Mad? Me? Perhaps. And you laughed and laughed and laughed and said, But let’s look on the bright side, shall we? If only the insane can forgive the unforgivable, then I can now forgive myself.
Even with this power, you cannot forgive yourself, because you are preoccupied with whether Bon will ever forgive you. You wait for Bon to join your chorus of ghosts, so that you can at least see him again, but he does not appear. What does this mystery mean?
As for Man, your aunt tells you that he has left the embassy and returned to the homeland. You have no information about the status of his face. Why aren’t you crying? you had demanded of Man, tears gushing from your eyes. Where did your body store its incredible quantity of fluid? Was there an aquifer somewhere above your gut, connected by a siphon to the tear ducts? Or was your body just a sponge, absorbing sorrow, and grief, and melancholy, and regret over the years, drop by salty drop, until the hands of pain and loss gathered your body in their grip and squeezed?
Why aren’t you crying?
Man looked at you with reddened eyes that had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows. I can’t cry anymore. My tear ducts have been burned shut. He took out a small vial and applied drops of clear liquid to each eye. He kept applying the drops until his eyes flooded and tears of saline lubricant rolled down his cheeks. This is how I cry now.
You do not recall how long the two of you sat with Bon’s body, but you assume it was hours before you stopped shaking and shuddering from being wrung nearly dry by the hands of pain and loss. The dust washed from your eyes, you see very clearly, but your body feels off-kilter, given that it has been squeezed so hard and so much liquid has been lost. You watch as Man removes all forms of identification from the bodies of Smelly, Angry, and Bon, and you watch yourself as you clasp Bon’s hands, rub his arm
s and shoulders, pat his chest and cheeks, close his eyes and mouth, lie down next to him in his blood and get as close to him as you can, and you can see yourself doing all of this even during those moments when your eyes are closed. You watch as Man lifts you from the ground and ushers you out of Delights of Asia, and you watch as you moan at the door, looking one last time at Bon, until Man says that it’s three in the morning and time to leave. The street is deserted. Man takes you to the Boss’s car, drives you to your aunt’s, explains the situation tersely. You watch yourself point the way to the Boss’s cash and request—no, demand—that they check you into Paradise. And here you are, safe in your asylum, one of the committed.
The question is: Committed to what? You have had two years in Paradise to ponder that question, to reflect on your life and the shattered bits of Bon’s head, to confess to the crimes you have committed, to acknowledge that after everything you have been through, everything you have done, you are still committed to revolution, which must mean you’re crazy, but no crazier than the first idealistic cavewoman who dreamed of conjuring fire from nothing, whose fate, after she discovered fire, was most likely being burned at the stake by the more cynical cavemen who knew that fire was really something, was power itself, so that even back then at the earliest moments of human civilization, the dialectic was moving back and forth between aspiration and exploitation, a movement that will never stop, for you agree with Mao that the dialectic is infinite, with one important exception, for unlike Mao and Stalin and Winston Churchill and King Leopold and a lot of American presidents and English kings and French emperors and Catholic popes and Oriental despots and countless millions of fathers, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and playboys, you do not believe that such a dialectic requires the sacrifice of millions in the name of communism or capitalism or Christianity or nationalism or fascism or racism or, indeed, sexism, of which you are guilty, guilty, abjectly guilty, and this conviction in an infinite dialectic that does not require enforcement by a Repressive State Apparatus, this article of faith that history’s wheels need not be oiled by blood, this skepticism about Fanon’s belief in the positive benefits of violence, justifiable given the brutality of French violence in Algeria, but nonetheless blind to the possibility that violence could make us feel like men yet behave like devils, whereas nonviolence could detoxify us and free us from our inferiority complexes, lift us from despair and fear, and restore the self-respect we need for action, and instead of making us mirror images of our colonizers, nonviolence could break the mirror altogether and liberate us from the need to see ourselves in the eyes of our oppressors, forcing us into the disturbing space of the negative, the nothing, the blank, the void, where we must create ourselves anew, each of us unique, each of us in solidarity with others in their uniqueness, a sincere but maybe stupid belief that makes you a man of either vision or hallucination, but one who insists that humanity already knows everything it needs to know to save itself without resorting to murder, beginning with what the most sympathetic Federico García Lorca, assassinated by the Spanish fascists, once said, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,” an empathetic principle that, if followed with action, whether it is doing something or doing nothing, depending on the dialectical need of the situation, will never lead you in the wrong direction, even if that direction is death, since so many people are committed to the exact opposite principle, to side with those who already have something and want everything, and if you were sane you would side with them, too, but revolution is always an act of insanity, because revolution is not a revolution unless it is committed to the impossible, although if this is too depressing and daunting one needs to remember that only a few thousand years ago it was beyond the human imagination that one could travel around the world in a day, an amazing feat that has brought the world together, so that today nowhere in the world is beyond the reach of tourists, investors, missionaries, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, meaning that the infinite dialectic still swings back and forth between the impossible and the possible, between salvation and annihilation, between nonviolence and violence, between our capacity to save ourselves and destroy ourselves, and the only real mystery is which part of us—our humanity or inhumanity—will triumph in the human species’ perpetual game of Russian roulette with itself, and you yourself, human and inhuman, are demented enough to believe that if the human species does not self-destruct—an IF that should be capitalized, it is so big—then one day the nobodies of the world with nothing to lose will finally have enough of not having enough and realize that they have more in common with the nobodies on the other side of the world, or just the other side of the nearest border, than they do with the somebodies of their own kind who care nothing about them, and when these nobodies with nothing finally do unite, stand up, take to the streets, and claim their voices and their power, the only thing that the somebodies with something must do is nothing, realizing that their Ideological State Apparatus cannot stop all these people, because for all of its might their Repressive State Apparatus cannot kill them all. Can it?
The Committed Page 35
