Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

I wiped the fingerprints off my glass with my handkerchief, and it was with the handkerchief wrapped around the doorknob that I thought I heard Sonny moan. I looked down at the back of his shattered head, but I could hear nothing more above the thrumming of blood in my ears. You know what you have to do, Bon said. I got on my knees, lowering my face to look Sonny in his one exposed eye. When the liquid contents of my dinner rose up against the back of my throat, I clapped my hand over my mouth. I swallowed hard and tasted vileness. Sonny’s eye was lusterless and blank. He must surely be dead, but as Bon had told me, sometimes the dead did not know they were dead yet. So it was that I reached forth my index finger, slowly, closer and closer to that eye, which moved not at all. My finger hovered an inch before the eye, then a few millimeters. No movement. Then my finger touched that soft, rubbery eye, the texture of a peeled quail egg, and he blinked. I jumped back as his body shuddered, just a little, and then I fired another bullet into his temple from a foot away. Now, Bon said, he’s dead.

I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and almost threw up. A little more than three minutes had elapsed since the first shot. I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and my liquid contents achieved precarious equilibrium. After all was still, I opened Sonny’s door and walked out with presidential confidence, as Bon recommended. Breathe, Claude said. So I breathed, running down the echoing stairway, and I breathed once more as I exited into the lobby, where the front door was opening.

He was a white man, the lawn mower of middle age having blazed a broad swatch of baldness through his hair. The well-tailored, cheap-looking suit bolted to his considerable body implied he worked in one of those low-paying professions where appearances counted, where one worked on commission. His wingtips glistened with the sheen of frozen fish. I knew all this because I looked at him, which Bon said not to do. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t give people a reason to give you a second look. But he did not even look at me. Eyes straight ahead, he walked by as if I were invisible, a ghost or, more likely, just another unremarkable white man. I passed through his vapor trail of artificial pheromone, the dime-store cologne of the macho male, and caught the front door before it closed. Then I was on the street, breathing in the Southern Californian air, fine-grained with the particulates of smog, heady with the realization that I could go wherever I wanted. I made it as far as my car. There, kneeling by the wheel well, I vomited, heaving until nothing was left, staining the gutter with the tea leaves of my insides.

It’s normal, Bon said the next morning. He soothed the hematoma swelling from my mind with the aid of a fine bottle of scotch, granted by the General. It just had to be done, and we’re the ones who have to live with it. Now you understand. Drink up. We drank up. You know what the best cure is? I had thought the best cure was to return to Lana, which I had done after leaving Sonny’s apartment, but even an unforgettable evening with her had not helped me forget what I had done to Sonny. I shook my head slowly, careful not to rattle my bruised brain. Getting back to the battlefield. You’ll feel better in Thailand. If that was true, then fortunately I did not have to wait long. We were leaving tomorrow, the scheduling planned to help me avoid any possibility of entanglement with the law and to avoid my plot’s obvious weakness, Ms. Mori. On hearing of Sonny’s death, her first thoughts might be confused, but her subsequent thoughts would turn to me, her jilted lover. The General had trusted that I would get the deed done on the date I promised, and he had provided me with my ticket the previous week. We were in his office, the newspaper on his desk, and when I opened my mouth, he lifted his hand and said, It goes without saying, Captain. I closed my mouth. I inspected the ticket, and that evening I wrote my Parisian aunt. In code, I told Man that I accepted responsibility for disobeying his orders, but that I was returning with Bon to save his life. I did not inform Man of my plan for how to do that, because I still did not have one. But I had gotten Bon into this situation, and it was up to me to get him out of it if I could.

So, two days after the deed was done, with no one yet having noticed Sonny’s absence, except, perhaps, for Ms. Mori, we left with no fanfare aside from that provided by the General and Madame at the airport gate. There were four of us departing on this unlikely trip — Bon, myself, the grizzled captain, and the affectless lieutenant — slung across the Pacific in a tubular, subsonic Boeing airliner. Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I’ve had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer. I was in a daze and terribly uncomfortable, sharing my seat as I was with the crapulent major on one side and Sonny on the other. It was only my seventh time on a jet airplane. I had flown to and from America for college, then flew with Bon from Saigon to Guam and Guam to California, followed by my round trip to the Philippines, and now this. My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative? I would leave the anti-American negativity and pessimism to Bon, who had never assimilated and was relieved to go. It’s like I’ve been hiding in someone else’s house, he said somewhere over the Pacific. He was sitting across the aisle from me. The Japanese stewardesses were serving tempura and tonkatsu, which tasted better than the last word the General had forced into my mouth at the departure gate. In between the walls, Bon said, listening to other people live, coming out only at night. I can breathe now. We’re going back where everyone looks like us. Like you, I said. I don’t look like everyone there. Bon sighed. Stop bitching and moaning, he said, filling my teacup with the whiskey the General had given him at the gate. Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking. So I’ll just shup up then, I said. Yes, just shut up, he said. All right, then, I’ll shut up, I said. Jesus Christ, he said.

After a sleepless twenty-hour trek that involved changing planes in Tokyo, we arrived in Bangkok. I was exhausted, not having been able to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw either the crapulent major’s face or Sonny’s, which I could not bear to look at for long. Thus it was not surprising that when I picked up my rucksack from the baggage carousel, I found it to be heavier than I remembered, loaded as it was now with guilt, dread, and anxiety. The overstuffed rucksack was my only piece of luggage, for before leaving our apartment, we had given the key to the Reverend R-r-r-r-amon and told him to sell our things and keep the money for his Church of Everlasting Prophets. All my belongings now fit in the rucksack, my copy of Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction in its false bottom, the book so well worn it had nearly split in two along its cracked spine. Everything else we needed would be provided in Thailand, the General said. Matters would be handled by the admiral in charge of the base camp and by Claude, who would be there in a guise familiar to him, working for a nongovernmental organization that assisted refugees. He greeted us at the international gate dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and linen pants, looking the same as I had seen him last at Professor Hammer’s house, except for being deeply tanned. It’s great to see you guys, he said, shaking my hand and those of the others. Welcome to Bangkok. You guys ever been here? Didn’t think so. We’ve got one night and we’re painting the town red. My treat. He threw his arm around my shoulders and squeezed with genuine affection, leading me through the throbbing crowd and toward the exit. Perhaps it was only my state of mind, its consistency close to porridge, but every one of the natives we passed seemed to be looking at the two of us. I wondered if among them was one of Man’s agents. You look good, Claude said. You ready to do this thing?