Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

After the oldest was finished, the room was quiet except for the agent’s sobbing and the hiss of the cigarettes being smoked by the other policemen. The oldest, catching me looking at him as he tucked his shirt in, shrugged. Somebody else would do it. So why not us? The youngest said, Don’t waste your time talking to him. He couldn’t get it up to give her the treatment anyway. Look, he hasn’t even touched his soda. It was true, I had forgotten the bottle in my hand. It was no longer even cold. If you’re not going to drink it, the middle-aged one said, give it to me. I did not move and the exasperated policeman walked three paces to me and seized the bottle. He took a sip and made a face. I hate warm soda. He said this with malevolence and offered me back the bottle, but I could only look blankly at it, my mind as numb as my fingers had been. Wait a minute, said the oldest. No need to make the man drink warm soda when this one here needs a good washing. He patted the agent’s knee, and at that touch, and at those words, she came back to life, rearing her head and glaring at us all with a hatred so intense that every man in the room should have turned to cinders and smoke. But nothing happened. We remained flesh and blood, and so did she as the middle-aged policeman laughed, putting his thumb over the bottle’s mouth and shaking it vigorously. Good idea, he said. But it’s going to be sticky!

Yes, memory was sticky. I must have stepped on some of that soda, even though afterward the policemen had splashed buckets of water on the agent and the table, then mopped the tile floor. (I ordered them to do that, said the crapulent major. They weren’t happy about cleaning up after themselves, I can tell you that.) As for the agent, left on the table still naked, she no longer screamed or even sobbed but was dead silent, eyes closed once more, head flung back, back arched. After the policemen had flushed themselves from her, they left the drained bottle inside, buried to the throat of its neck. I can see right into her, said the middle-aged policeman, bending down to peer through the bottom of the bottle with gynecological interest. Let me see, said the youngest, shouldering him aside. I don’t see a thing, he complained. It’s a joke, you idiot! shouted the oldest. A joke! Yes, a very bad joke, a slapstick travesty that one understands in any language, as Claude did. While the policemen played doctor with their makeshift speculum, he came up to me and said, Just so you know? I didn’t teach them how to do that. The bottle, I mean. They came up with it all on their own.

They were good students, just like me. They learned their lesson well, and so have I, so if you would please just turn off the lights, if you would please just turn off the telephone, if you would just stop calling me, if you would remember that the two of us were once and perhaps still are the best of friends, if you could see that I have nothing left to confess, if history’s ship had taken a different tack, if I had become an accountant, if I had fallen in love with the right woman, if I had been a more virtuous lover, if my mother had been less of a mother, if my father had gone to save souls in Algeria instead of here, if the commandant did not need to make me over, if my own people did not suspect me, if they saw me as one of them, if we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand years, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if Adam and Eve still frolicked in the Garden of Eden, if the dragon lord and the fairy queen had not given birth to us, if the two of them had not parted ways, if fifty of their children had not followed their fairy mother to the mountains, if fifty more had not followed their dragon father to the sea, if legend’s phoenix had truly soared from its own ashes rather than simply crashed and burned in our countryside, if there were no Light and no Word, if Heaven and earth had never parted, if history had never happened, neither as farce nor as tragedy, if the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born, if my mother was never cleft, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Of course you cannot sleep. Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake, or so the commandant said. He spoke as I lay on my mattress, a specimen on a slide under a microscope, and with a shutter’s smooth snick, I realized that the doctor’s experiment had succeeded. I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above, beyond the illuminated ceiling, buffeted from my agony through an invisible gyroscopic mechanism. Seen from this altitude, the vivisection being done to me was actually very interesting, leaving my wobbly body’s yolk shimmering beneath my viscous white mind. Thus simultaneously subjugated and elevated, I was beyond the comprehension of even Sonny and the crapulent major, who remained on the plane of my chronic sleeplessness, peering over the shoulders of the doctor, the commandant, and the commissar as they stood around me, no longer in lab coats, scrubs, and stainless steel goggles but in yellow uniforms with red tabs of rank, pistols holstered on their hips. While those below were human and ghost, I was the supernatural Holy Spirit, clairvoyant and clairaudient. In this detached way, I saw the commandant kneel down and reach his hand toward my subhuman self, index finger slowly extending until it pressed lightly on my open eyeball, a touch at which my poor body flinched.

MYSELF

Please, let me sleep.

THE COMMANDANT

You can sleep when I’m satisfied with your confession.

MYSELF

But I’ve done nothing!

THE COMMANDANT

Exactly.

MYSELF

The lights are too bright. If you could—

THE COMMANDANT

The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that — they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception.

MYSELF

I spoke out, didn’t I? Is it my fault no one listened?

THE COMMANDANT

Don’t make excuses! We didn’t whine. We were all willing to be martyrs. It’s only pure luck that the doctor, the commissar, and myself are alive. You simply weren’t willing to sacrifice yourself to save the agent, though she was willing to sacrifice her life to save the commissar’s.

MYSELF

No, I—

THE COMMANDANT

and

THE COMMISSAR

and

THE DOCTOR

(in unison)

Admit it!

I saw myself admit it then. I heard myself acknowledge that I was not being punished or reeducated for the things I had done, but for the thing I had not done. I wept and cried without shame for the shame I felt. I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing! And not only did I weep and cry; I howled, a tornado of feeling causing the windows of my soul to shudder and clack. The sight and sound of my abjection was so disturbing that everyone averted his eyes from the sorry mess I had made of myself, except for the commandant, the commissar, and I.