Sullivan downed another shot. In his mind he blared to the world, Expect nothing if insurgents attack. We’ve nothing to offer. It is the lesson we’ve learned from Viet Nam. Lo, if thee shall fall behind the creeping curtain of restricted information flow—we know not your suffering. How can it be?! It’s not on our TV.
“In the lee of world view,” the report said, “Khmers had to march to their deaths even when they knew that was where they were marching.” My daughter, marching to her death, he thought, and the anger in him was so immense, only another shot kept him from tearing the bar from the floor and thrashing the people behind him, beside him.
Fornicate in your BMWs, he screamed at them in his mind, while the filthy fat female sighs lewdly over your vehicular speakerphone, only three dollars per minute. Masturbate in stone-washed dun-gar-ees. You are not worthy to entertain the thought of assisting others. Abdicate thy responsibility with dry, stinkless armpits. You can be sure you are not worthy. You can feel soft as a gentle summer breeze—as Khmers toast.
Soft leather reclining bucket seats with six-speaker vehicular video-audio...Lao die under yellow rain from poison bee pollen shaken from bugs by PAVN high explosives and napalm. Peace at last in Southeast Asia!
Peace is at hand. Sullivan now drank directly from the beer bottle, purposely hoping it disgusted the well dressed about him. The domino theory has been disproven. Angola does not touch Kampuchea. I am not worthy. Abdicate thy responsibility to the people of the world. Do not give me your homeless. They probably carry disease. I am not worthy to even think I may be intelligent enough to sort out what is decent from what is foul. The insurgents have legitimate points, after all. World, you are not worthy of the sacrifice of even one American life. Have a bag of money. Let me sell you some bombs. It is the lesson of Viet Nam.
I have a daughter! She is the property of Angkar Leou! You bastards. Fornicate in thy Mercedes in your sealed, secure garage, behind your tight security system—in your stone-washed denim lacy lingerie from Freddie of HoBo Woods.
Why? Bastards! You devious, calculating...make a “new communist woman” of my daughter...Is that a manifestation of your “purity of purpose,” your desire for pure communism?
What of our myths, our moral foundation, our history, my fellow Americans? In January 1961 John F. Kennedy said
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger....The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
Was it not that spirit which propelled me, us, into the Viet Nam era? Change the word “spirit” to “purpose” or “motive.” The spirit, purpose, and motive survived Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets. But it could not survive the icon busters. Revelations that JFK was boffing MM or whomever while Jackie was on hold tarnished the hero in the tabloid brains of America and that tarnish dulled his beautiful, altruistic and moralistic ideals. Results: the hero falls from grace and with him the mythical strength, his high ideals and with that, the motivation to emulate. Cultural idealism wanes. Society accepts less, standards fall, people emulate the mores of television vamps and the generation gurus.
Lock your iron triangle on thy guilt, oh nation. I am not worthy of any good. Thus I am free from trying. Look out for number one! It is the lesson of Viet Nam.
Reexamine your viewpoints, your foresight and hindsight—not, for most, your principles. Fifty million people have been enslaved in Southeast Asia since the falls, fifty million political hostages. Around the world “free” nations are backing off to appease Soviet expansionism because of America’s decline in power, not firepower but willpower. Oh, to lie you down, America. Right there. On that couch. Lie down, you big overstuffed oaf. Oh to be the guide on your psychoanalytic journey—not because you are nuts, but because you’ve got so much right with you, so much of positive value to offer the world. If only you weren’t hung up on immediate gratification. If only you could cope with your insecurities and face reality. If only you had a sense of your own, and world, history.
Fuck it! Fornicate on the hood of your Ferrari. Nay, masturbate, America. No one wants to lie with the guilt ridden.
But know this, world, America may stay at home—but John Sullivan is coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
March 1978
“I KILLED MY FATHER,” Met Nang told Vathana. He had had her brought to his house, bathed, scrubbed raw, fed, given chloro-quinine and tetracycline, and put in the cage in his room. “Well, not really,” Nang continued. His words were quick though he tried to portray himself as detached. “He killed himself. I could have prevented it. Maybe not. He...he was so...I mean he confessed. He confessed to being infected with yuon disease. He confessed to many horrible and malicious acts against the people and against the state. Of course, he had to die.”
“I killed my father,” Nang repeated. Vathana said nothing. She was not expected to comment. She squatted in the low cage when Nang came, squatted, stared, listened. At times the young man babbled straight Krahom-Marxist cliché babble; at other times he referred to very intimate details of his personal life, yet all of it was scattered and out of context. For months Vathana had no idea what he was talking about. Always there was the one recurring theme: I killed my father.
When Nang was not home Met Nem, the housekeeper and teacher of Nang’s children, often let Vathana out of the cage. Nem was severe yet, within her own system, consistent and just. She was given the task of remaking Vathana in the image of Angkar. It was serious business. Angkar was strong. Vathana must be strong. Angkar was powerful. Vathana must be powerful. Angkar was righteous, pure, single-minded. Vathana must hold only the beliefs of Angkar Leou. The skin of her feet and hands, which had looked like dried wax when she’d been chosen, began to moisten and fill. Her hair grew out. Clumps with scabs fell off leaving bald pink patches on the scalp but these were soon hidden beneath thickening new growth. Daily Nem coined Vathana, rubbing her back or shoulders or legs with a brass coin until the skin seemingly glowed red. Nem pulled her earlobes, her hair. Vathana, having twice been starved to the point where food was repulsive, was now again force-fed until she continuously craved food. In the cage her body filled out like a calf being fattened for veal.
Each day Nang made Nem undress Vathana before him so he could gauge the results. The sickly stick figure became curvaceous. Nang lifted her breasts—once nothing but shriveled nipples in a sunken chest, now, slowly, the lovely tissues of femininity—with his pincer. “It is,” he told Nem, not even addressing Vathana, “the best way to assess the progress.”
Then for days he would be gone and Vathana would sit or squat or lie in the small tiger cage in his room in his house in the forest isolated from the horrors, forced to listen to Radio Phnom Penh, to listen to Pol Pot’s three-, four-, five-hour broadcasts. Then the winds shifted, the rains passed and the harvest season came. During daylight new winds carried a constant low moaning. At night, all night, the wind brought a ghastly, odorous cloud. There was a great thrust at the border, vicious fighting, constant reports of Khmer victories, each nearer to the heart of Democratic Kampuchea.
Nang returned. He was flushed, feverish, agitated. Again he babbled the nonsense about killing his father, but now to Vathana he seemed not to hear his own words. Then he said to her, “You are now loyal to Angkar.” She, as always, did not respond. He turned on her, a harsh evil glare contorting his scarred features. “You are now one with Angkar.”
“Yes, Met Nang.” She did not know what he wanted. She wanted only more food.
“Yes. You had better say yes. We destroyed the foreign devils. Yes?”
“Yes, Met Nang.”
“Where is Nem?”
“I’m not given to...”
“You,” Nang exploded, “are one with Angkar! Angkar saved you. Angkar gave you life.” Nang reached out, grasped her shirt, jerked it hard
throwing her across the room. The shirt opened. He leaped toward her, grabbed the shirttail and ripped up, over her head. Vathana cringed. Nang seized her skirt, yanked it from her. “I fuck them,” he shouted. “Do you doubt me?”
“N...no.” Vathana rushed the answer.
“I fuck them and kill them because they are evil. Do you doubt me?”
“No.”
“Should I fuck you?” he screamed. He stood over her, his teeth clenched, his hands balled into rock-tight fists ready to smash her to death. Vathana looked into his eyes. Behind his insanity she saw his fear and she relaxed. “Should I?” Nang screamed. Vathana lay back. She touched her fingertips to her shoulders, above her breasts, her elbows at her side. She did not know why but she was not afraid. She resisted by offering no resistance.
“I fuck them all,” Nang seethed again. He dropped to a knee, grasped her pants, ripped them apart. “Then I cover them with city evils.” As he spoke he shoved his stubbed hand between her legs, rubbing, separating the labia. “Rouge, lipstick, necklaces.” Nang laughed. Vathana stared at the roof. She shuddered from a stab of pain. Still she did not resist. “The yuons stuff women with rice stalks. Ha! But you are one with Angkar.” His tone became less severe, his pressure softened. “You are not yet called to walk to Thailand. Struggle, Met Ana. Struggle courageously to be one with Angkar.”
Now Nang smiled. He seemed relieved, then dizzy, then relieved again. It was very hot, the moaning was very loud. “I fucked you well, eh?”
“Yes, Met Nang.”
“We must have faith in Met Sar, in Pol Pot, in Angkar. Angkar will crush all enemies.”
“Yes, Met Nang.”
“Now you must come with me. I will show you how enemies are crushed. Then we can fuck again. The CIA pays thousands of evildoers but we ferret them out. Everyone must be scrutinized. Anyone may be an agent. Anyone!”
In late December the Viet Namese launched a massive broad-front attack stretching from the Gulf of Siam to the high plateau of the Srepok Forest. Again fear of treachery set off a wave of killings in the interior and again Met Nang became very busy. Now he did not leave Vathana in the cage but brought her to witness his efficiency. First he showed her the prisons, the meticulous records room, the photography “studio,” the confession chambers.
“You must read his confession,” Nang told her one day.
“Whose?”
“My father’s. He was very evil.”
Vathana stared at Nang. She was reluctant to answer. This creature had total control of her. “If you wish me to see...”
“Ha! Maybe sometime, Met Ana. You are very brave. Tonight I will fuck you well. Very special. Now I will show you a platform ceremony.”
The Viet Namese invasion fizzled in January 1978. The Krahom armies drove the invaders back toward the border, and in celebration the Center launched a new purge. For two months Vathana accompanied Nang to witness one atrocity after another. Some were small: a married couple stripped, the wife raped by several yotheas before her husband—then his genitals hacked off and given to her—then both disemboweled. Some were large: platform ceremonies like the earliest ones, except now the women and children were told they were being reunited with fathers or husbands who had disappeared years earlier. They were lined up on the platform, given a speech, given flowers to present to the men who would come shortly. Till the very end the ruse continued. Bloodlines were being eradicated. Some were massive: groups of a hundred or two hundred were led, arms tied, to dikes of neighboring sangkats, then they were bludgeoned to death with hardwood clubs. As young children shrieked for their kin, yotheas bayoneted them or grabbed them by the feet and used them as clubs to smash the adults. The neighbors were called to bury the dead. Then they were ordered to dig deep ponds which later became their own mass graves.
Now as they traversed the northern part of the zone, Vathana saw many empty phums. Many nights she lay limp and the thought would come to her, come softly without intensity, come to her emptied spirit, I have seen so much, too much, when this ends I shall never see again.
In the early months of 1978 she was so numb she followed Nang like a beaten dog. He had taken to “fucking” her every night. The sessions never lasted long and most often it was with the stub of his damaged hand. Yet some nights were “very special.” These nights he penetrated her with various objects: the femur of a long-dead victim, a long narrow ebony statuette of Pol Pot carved by a prisoner to Nang’s specifications, a loaded American 45-caliber pistol. “This is how Americans fuck,” Nang would coo. “Very special, eh?”
Through it all Vathana remained submissive, passive, at times praying, calling in her mind, Divine Buddha, Enchanted One, Compassionate One! but most often not praying, attempting on an inner plane to become nonexistent and thus to mask all emotions. She was not totally successful. “Everything I see takes a piece of my heart,” she once told one of Nang’s children. “Soon I’ll have no heart. You have a heart, eh? I’ve seen many piles of dead. I’ve seen...one time he brought me to see a forest ambush. Then he told me he brought his own father on ambush and the old man tried to warn the people by ticking his finger against a dry palm frond. Met Nang pretended to be asleep. He is very tricky, eh?” The child liked the story and told the others and for a week Nang didn’t fuck her because he was too angry.
Then he took her to the cliff. He was so proud. “Tonight,” he told her, “will be very very special. This is where I killed my father.” Nang was joyous. It was late March. The sun was high, the wind carried the sounds and smells away from the small tree house. A dozen yotheas were playing blindman’s buff with the emaciated waste of political upheaval. Some people screamed when they fell, some seemed able to see beneath their blindfolds. Some of these ran, leaped from the precipice, attempting to deny the yotheas the enjoyment of their death. Most stumbled, half dead already, finally tripping at the edge, sliding down the short lip then silently falling; the sound of their bodies hitting denied the yotheas because of the odd wind. The boys became bored and left.
“He died very well for an enemy,” Nang said. “I’ll have Met Arn fetch his file. You’ll see. You would do exactly what I did. When I was in school I was taught this.”
The day moved slowly on, the sun seemed to linger. Nang told her about the school on Pong Pay Mountain and his journey north. Between incidents he lambasted her for her weakness, for her improper background, for not having become a neary long before Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk. He raged about friends and foes. “We are betrayed by devious allies and heinous saboteurs,” he shouted. Then, “But my security apparatus will get them. It will uncover them all.” He paced, waiting for the sun to set, waiting for Arn, waiting to show her his Lakshmi, his own vision of the hell which awaits the treacherous and the evil ones. “More than eight hundred families in the district are under suspicion. There are twenty thousand ex-CIA agents in 169 alone. I will prove them all traitors, all.”
As the sky darkened Vathana stood beside Nang. She watched the lines forming up out of sight of the cliff’s edge. Arn brought the file Nang had requested. Agitated more than ever Nang rampaged amongst the papers. His hand shook, his entire body was in near spasm. “Look!” he ordered, shaking the confession before her. “See!” He snatched it back. He read a line here, there, then found and read aloud the paragraph he wanted her to hear:
...in appearance I am totally a revolutionary. I struggle to cultivate the paddies, I vigorously attack the forest, I courageously plow and rake. But deep in my mind I serve the imperialists. I can no longer hide my traitorous acts of toeing the American line. I am a feudalist. I stood with the establishment. I am not a human being. I am an animal...
“See! See! An animal! He wasn’t human. See! He denied his humanity, therefore he could be killed. I was right. Kampuchea must be purified.”
As Nang spoke the generator kicked on and lights appeared over the abyss. Vathana trembled but she could not turn away. The wind shifted. The smell was horrible but still she bore
witness. Screams of those being murdered cut her like the hatchets of the fertilizer pit. She could not move. The screams, the low moaning, penetrated her veil of defensive numbness. She cried inwardly, afraid, aware again of fear, of her fear, fear of expressing an emotion. For hours she stood holding the railing, stood frozen, stood dying inside with each scream. Nang launched into a new harangue. “Today, ninety-five percent of the people live under better conditions than they did under the old regime.” On and on he went. “Without the collective system we are defenseless. Without it the yuons would disappear the entire Khmer race.” On and on went the killings. At first light the descending screams ceased. Now there was a new flurry of activity. The odor of gasoline enveloped them. “We must get down.” Nang prodded her. In the dim light Vathana could see yotheas throwing hundreds of small bags of liquid over the cliff, the bags bursting onto the mass of broken screaming groaning bodies. Then a torch. Everyone standing fell flat. From the abyss came a long FaaAHHHH-WHHUUUMP, a blast of flame, an ear-splitting roar, a swirling wind. The screaming died. Below, the mutilated living suffocated as the conflagration sucked all air from around them. The bodies hardly burnt. Some charred in small secondary fires. Now there was no moaning.
Nang led Vathana down the steep path beside the cavern, across the small trail which brought them to the base of the cliff.
“Before we used flame,” Nang said, businesslike, a subordinate foreman explaining a process to a manufacturing CEO, “the flies were horrible. Now it’s not so bad.”
“This is how you murdered your father?” Vathana’s voice for the first time was strong. Nang stepped back. “Like this.?”
“Well, not exactly. He really killed himself. He...”
“You’ve murdered all these people?!”
“No! They’re enemies. Every one. Everyone’s confessed. They’re animals. Old grass must be burned for new grass to grow.”
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 98
