by Robert Stone
When he turned round, Madame was staring at the closed door of the safe. He went past her into the small bar that adjoined the lobby; she followed to sell him a bottle of pilfered PX Sprite from the pilfered PX cooler.
“Beaucoup de travail demain,” Converse said, attempting to convey zestful satisfaction in his profession.
Madame Colletti grimaced.
She never used the same expression twice, Converse thought. Conversation with her was a series of small unpleasant surprises.
Early in the spring, Converse had been away in the Delta, and Madame had rented Room Number Sixteen in his absence. The man who had taken it apparently had a thing about squashing lizards. Converse returned to find nearly a dozen of them mashed into the walls and the tiles of the floor. He had found it disturbing. Like most people he was rather fond of house lizards. They ate insects and were fun to watch when one was high.
The management had made a few gestures toward effacing the traces of carnage but there were still stains and remnants of tiny dinosaur skeleton. Murder haunted the room.
Whoever he was, he had spent hours stomping around his soiled gray hotel room wasting lizards with the framed tintype of Our Lady of Lourdes that stood on the night table.
Converse sat at his writing desk, drinking Sprite, looking at the lizard smears. It was just as well not to wonder why. There was never any satisfaction in that. Perhaps the man had thought they would bite him. Or perhaps they had kept him awake nights, whispering together. The man had also diligently crushed all his used batteries so that the hotel flunkies couldn’t recycle them through Thieves’ Market.
An extrovert.
On the desk beside him was a thermos bottle filled with cold water. It was supposed to be bottled water, but Converse knew for a fact that the porter filled it from the tap. Every day he poured it into the shower drain. Every day the porter refilled it. From the tap. Every day Converse felt guiltier about not drinking it.
That was the liberal sensibility for you, he thought. It began to give in the face of such persistence. One day, perhaps, he would feel thoroughly obliged to drink it.
The thermos was somewhat original, an actual Vietnamese artifact, and Converse planned to take it with him when he left. Printed across it in bright colors was the picture of a wide-winged bat; on the bat’s breast was the brand name—LUCKY.
He stood up and went across the cement air shaft to the bathroom, carrying the thermos with him. When he had locked the door, he turned on the cold shower and poured the contents of the thermos into the drain.
Fuck it, he thought, why me?
There were plenty of other Americans around.
CONVERSE WAS, BY PROFESSION, AN AUTHOR. TEN YEARS before he had written a play about the Marine Corps which had been performed and admired. Since the production of his play, the only professional good fortune attending him had been the result of his marriage to the daughter of an editor and publisher.
Elmer Bender, Converse’s father-in-law, edited and published imitations of other magazines. The name of each Bender publication was designed to give its preoccupied and overstimulated purchasers the impression that they were buying the more popular magazine it imitated. If there were, for example, a magazine called Collier’s, Elmer would edit and publish a magazine called Shmollier’s.
“Mine are better,” Elmer would say. He was a veteran of New Masses and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
For seven years of his marriage to Marge, Elmer had employed Converse as principal writer on Nightbeat, which his lawyers described as A Weekly Tabloid With a Heavy Emphasis on Sex. He supervised a staff of two—Douglas Dalton, who was an elderly newspaper alcoholic with beautiful manners, and a Chinese Communist named Mike Woo, who had once attempted an explication of the theory of surplus value in the weekly horoscope. “Don’t be afraid to ask for a raise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pays you less than your work is actually worth!”
Five days each week, Converse peopled the nation with spanking judges and Lesbian motorcyclists.
At the turning of the seventh year, he had written a memory lane story about the late Porfirio Rubirosa entitled “Rubirosa Was a Fizzle in My Bed,” under the byline of Carmen Guittarez. In it, he had assumed the identity of a Sexy Latin Showgirl disappointed in the climax of her assignation with the World Famed Playboy and Bon Vivant. The story had led Converse to a Schizophrenic Episode.
For several days he had gone about imagining that a band of Bored and Corrupt Socialites might descend on his home in Berkeley, and in the name of their beloved Rubi, Wreak a Bizarre Revenge.
His difficulties with reality increased.
After a night of sinister racked sleep, he had gone to Elmer and enlisted his cooperation in securing press accreditation as a marginal correspondent in Saigon.
Bender had reluctantly agreed. It seemed to him that if Marge and Converse endured a period of separation, their union might regain some of its edge. Marge’s mother had been a left-wing Irish vegetarian, a suicide with her lover during the McCarthy days. It was often observed that Marge was very like her.
Converse suggested that something worthwhile might emerge from such an expedition, that there might be a book or a play. The argument particularly moved Elmer, who was an author in his own right—one of his early stories had earned him a passionate letter of appreciation from Whittaker Chambers. Marge, who loved all that was fateful, had sullenly agreed.
He flew out of Oakland on the morning after their daughter’s second birthday. In Saigon, Converse was able to extend his employment by taking over the positions of departing stringers and hustling a few of his own. And surely enough, the difficulties he had been experiencing with reality were in time obviated. One bright afternoon, near a place called Krek, Converse had watched with astonishment as the world of things transformed itself into a single overwhelming act of murder. In a manner of speaking, he had discovered himself. Himself was a soft shell-less quivering thing encased in a hundred and sixty pounds of pink sweating meat. It was real enough. It tried to burrow into the earth. It wept.
After his exercise in reality, Converse had fallen in with Charmian and the dope people; he became one of the Constantly Stoned. Charmian was utterly without affect, cool and full of plans. She had taken leave of life in a way which he found irresistible.
When, after a little fencing, she had put the plan to him, he had found that between his own desperate emptiness and her fascination for him, he was unable to refuse. She had contacts in the States, a few thousand to invest, and access to Colonel Tho, whose heroin refinery was the fourth largest building in Saigon. He had fifteen thousand dollars in a Berkeley bank, the remnants of a sum he had received for an unproduced film version of his play. Ten thousand dollars, it developed, would buy him a three-quarters share on three kilos of the Colonel’s Own Mixture and his share of the stateside sale would be forty thousand. There would be no risk of misunderstanding because everybody was friends. Marge, as he foresaw, had gone along. The thing had come together.
His own reasons changed, it seemed, by the hour. Money in large amounts had never been particularly important to him. But he had been in the country for eighteen months and for all the discoveries it had become apparent that there would be no book, no play. It seemed necessary that there be something.
Showered, under the ceiling fan in his room at the Coligny, Converse woke to the telephone. Jill Percy was on the line to say that she and her husband would meet him in the Crazy Horse, a girlie bar off Tu Do Street.
Jill was becoming an international social worker and she had conceived a professional interest in girlie bars. She was always trying to get people to take her to them.
Converse dressed, pulled on his plastic anorak and went down to the street. It had started to rain again. As he walked toward Tu Do, he sifted through his pockets to find twenty piasters.
Halfway up the street, midway between the market and Tu Do, there was always a legless man squatting in a doorway. Each time Converse passed,
he would drop twenty piasters in the man’s upturned pith helmet. He had been doing so for more than a year, so that whenever the man saw Converse approach he would smile. It was as though they were friends. Often, Converse was tormented by an impulse to withold the twenty piasters to see what sort of a reaction there would be, but he had never had the courage.
Having dropped the twenty P and exchanged smiles with his friend, Converse sauntered down Tu Do to the Crazy Horse. The Crazy Horse was one of the Tu Do bars in which, according to rumor, the knowledgeable patron might be served a bracing measure of heroin with—some even said in—his beer. As a result it was usually off limits, and on this evening Converse was the only customer. Facing him across the bar were fifteen uniformly beautiful Vietnamese girls in heavy makeup. He took a stool, smiled pleasantly, and ordered a Schlitz. The girl opposite him began to deal out a hand of cards.
Beer in the Crazy Horse cost 250 piasters without heroin, and Converse was not in the mood for cards. He glanced down at the poker hand on the chrome before him as though it were a small, conventionally amusing animal, and affected to look over the girls with a worldly expression. In spite of the glacial air conditioning and his recent bath, his face was covered with sweat. The fifteen girls across the bar turned their eyes on him with identical expressions of bland, fathomless contempt.
Converse drank his beer, his sinuses aching. He felt no resentment; he was a humanist and it was their country. They were war widows or refugee country girls or serving officers of the Viet Cong. And there he was, an American with a stupid expression and pockets stuffed with green money, and there was no way they could get it off him short of turning him upside down and shaking him. It must make them want to cry, he thought. He was sympathetic.
He was searching his Vietnamese repertory for an expression of sympathy when Jill and Ian Percy arrived. Jill looked at the girls behind the bar with a wide white smile and sat down beside Converse. Ian came behind her, stooped and weary.
“Well,” Jill Percy said. “This looks like fun.”
A girl down the bar blew her nose and looked into her handkerchief.
“That’s what we’re here for,” Converse said.
The Percys order bottles of “33” beer; it was pronounced “bami-bam” and supposedly made with formaldehyde. Ian went over to the jukebox and played “Let It Be.”
“Staying through the summer?” Jill asked Converse.
“I guess so. Till the elections. Maybe longer. You?”
“We’ll be around forever. Right, Ian?”
“We’ll be around all right,” Ian said. Some “33” beer trickled from his mouth and into his sparse sandy beard. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “We’re waiting around until we get an explanation.”
Ian Percy was an Australian agronomist. He was also an engagé, one of the few—other than Quakers—one saw around. He had been in the country for fifteen years—with UNRRA, with WHO, with everyone who would hire him, ending with the Vietnamese government, which had him on loan from the Australian Ministry of Agriculture. A province chief up north had gotten him fired, and he had taken accreditation with an Australian daily which was actually more of a racing form than a newspaper. As an engagé he hated the Viet Cong. He also hated the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, Americans and particularly the civilians, Buddhist monks, Catholics, the Cao Dai, the French and particularly Corsicans, the foreign press corps, the Australian government, and his employers past—and, most especially—present. He was said to be fond of children, but the Percys had none of their own. They had met in Vietnam and it was not a place in which people felt encouraged to bear children.
“Bloody lot of people leaving,” Jill said. “We’re getting possessive about our friends.”
“Nobody wants to be the last rat,” Converse said.
Ian ordered another “33” beer. He drank “33” unceasingly from about four in the afternoon until after midnight.
“Poor old last rat,” Ian said. “God help him.”
Jill took her beer along the bar and started a conversation in Vietnamese with a bar girl opposite her. The other girls, softened by curiosity, leaned together to listen.
“What’s she saying?” Converse asked.
“She’s telling them her troubles.” The girls across from Jill had turned toward Ian and Converse and were nodding sympathetically. “Later she’ll come back and want them to tell her their troubles. She’s writing a report on Saigon bar girls.”
“What for?”
“Oh, for the information of the civilized world,” Ian said. “Not that the civilized world gives fuck all.”
They drank in silence for a while as Jill told her troubles to the bar girls.
“One thing,” Converse said, “this war is going to be well-documented. There’s more information available than there is shit loose to know about.”
An image came to Converse’s mind of the sheets of paper onto which the computers clacked out useful information for the conduct of the war. The prettiest were the ones which analyzed the loyalties and affiliations of country villages—these were known, with curious Shakespearean undertones, as Hamlet Evaluation Reports. The thought of Hamlet Evaluation Reports made Converse hungry. Each Friday the Vietnamese used them to wrap food in.
“Let’s eat,” he said. “Before it rains again.”
They went outside and walked down Tu Do toward the river. On the first corner they came to, the MPs had a soldier in fatigues up against the wall and were searching his many khaki pockets while a crowd of silent Saigonnais looked on. Converse bought Jill a marigold necklace from a sleepy child flower-seller on the edge of the crowd. The marigolds when they were fresh smelled wonderfully on hot nights; they reminded Converse of Charmian.
“O.K.,” Jill said. “The Guillaume Tell, the Tempura House or the floating restaurant?”
The floating restaurant would be too crowded, and Ian said that the chef at the Guillaume Tell had run away because someone had threatened to chop his hands off. They took the long way to the Tempura House, walking beside the lantern-lit barges on the riverfront. Mosquitoes hurried them on and reminded Converse of his fever. As they walked, they smoked Park Lane cigarettes, factory-packaged joints with glossy filters. “33” beer was supposed to be made with formaldehyde, Park Lane cigarettes were supposed to be rolled by lepers. The grass in them was not very good by Vietnamese standards, but if you smoked a whole one you got high. Little riverfront children ran up to them, fumbling at their arms to see their watches, calling after them—Bao chi, bao chi.
At the Tempura House they entered merrily, wafted on fumes of Park Lane, removed their shoes and settled down among the dapper Honda salesmen. Ian ordered more “33.”
“Ever see Charmian?” he asked Converse.
“I just left her. She’s the same.”
“Somebody told me,” Jill Percy said, “that Charmian had a habit.”
Converse essayed a smile.
“Bullshit,” he said.
“Or else that she was dealing. I can’t remember which.”
“You never know what Charmian’s into. But if she had a habit, I’d know about it.”
“You don’t see her so much now, do you?” Jill asked.
Converse shook his head.
“Charmian,” Ian said, “has a friend named Tho. He’s an Air Force colonel. In the cinnamon business.”
“You ought to look into Tho,” Jill told her husband. “He must be looming large around here if Charmian’s found him.”
“I don’t think Tho is coup material,” Converse said. “He has a very satisfied look.”
The waitress, who was at least partly Japanese, brought them a plate of red peppers. They rinsed their flushed faces with cool towels.
“Ever hear Charmian’s Washington stories?” Jill Percy asked. “She tells super Washington stories.”
“Charmian belongs to a vanished era in American history,” Converse said. “Not many people can claim that condi
tion at the age of twenty-five.”
“Ghosts,” Ian said. “The country’s full of ghosts now.”
Jill Percy whisked a pepper from the dish with her chopsticks and consumed it without flinching.
“You can hardly call Charmian a ghost. There are plenty of ghosts out here but they’re real ones.”
“Wherever you have a lot of unhappy people dying young,” Converse said, wiping his hands on the cool towel, “you’ll get a lot of ghosts.”
“We had a right bastard of a ghost down in our village,” Ian Percy said. “One of the sort they call Ma. He lived under a banyan tree and he came out during siesta to frighten the kiddies.”
“After the war,” Converse said, “they should fly over the la Drang valley dropping comic books and French dip sandwiches for all the GI Ma. It must be really a drag for them.”
Ian started another beer, ignoring the food before him.
“I’m not sure you’ve been around here long enough,” he told Converse, “to talk like that.”
Converse rested his chopsticks on the side of his plate.
“The way I see it, I get to say any fucking thing I want. I had my ass on the line. I been to war.” He turned to Jill, who was frowning at Ian. “Ain’t I, Jill? I appeared on the field of battle.”
“I was there,” she said. “I saw you, sport.”
“We went to war, Jill and me,” Converse announced to Ian. “And what did we do, Jill?”
“We cried,” Jill said.
“We cried,” Converse said, “that’s what we did. We wept tears of outraged human sensibility and we get to say any fucking thing we want.”
Both Jill and Converse had gone to see the invasion of Cambodia, and both had had experiences which had made them cry. But Converse’s tears had not been those of outraged human sensibility.
