Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

THE COMMISSAR

Satisfied?

THE COMMANDANT

So he’s admitted to doing nothing. But what about the Bru comrade and the Watchman?

THE COMMISSAR

He couldn’t have done anything to save the Bru comrade and the Watchman. As for the agent, she lived.

THE COMMANDANT

She couldn’t even walk when we liberated her.

THE COMMISSAR

Perhaps she was broken in body, but not in spirit.

THE DOCTOR

What happened to those policemen?

THE COMMISSAR

I found them.

THE COMMANDANT

They paid the price. Shouldn’t he?

THE COMMISSAR

Yes, but he should also receive credit for the lives he took.

THE COMMANDANT

Sonny and the major? Their pitiful lives aren’t even equal to the agent’s injuries.

THE COMMISSAR

But is his father’s life equal?

My father? What was this? Even Sonny and the crapulent major, appalled at the harsh evaluation of their lives and deaths, paused in their agitation to listen.

THE COMMANDANT

What did he do to his father?

THE COMMISSAR

Ask him yourself.

THE COMMANDANT

You! Look at me! What did you do to your father?

MYSELF

I didn’t do anything to my father!

THE COMMANDANT

and

THE COMMISSAR

and

THE DOCTOR

(in unison)

Admit it!

And looking down on my weeping, yolked self, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry in sympathy. Did I not remember what I had written to Man about my father? I wish he were dead .

MYSELF

But I didn’t mean it!

THE COMMISSAR

Be honest with yourself.

MYSELF

I didn’t mean for you to do it!

THE COMMISSAR

Of course you did! Who did you think you were writing to?

I was writing to the revolutionary who was on a powerful committee and who knew, even then, that he might one day be a commissar; I was writing to a political cadre already learning the plastic art of making over the souls and minds of men; I was writing to a friend who would do whatever I asked; I was writing to a writer who valued the force of a sentence and the weight of the word; I was writing to a brother who knew what I wanted more than I knew it myself.

THE COMMANDANT

and

THE COMMISSAR

and

THE DOCTOR

(in unison)

What did you do?

MYSELF

I wanted him dead!

The commandant rubbed his chin and looked doubtfully at the doctor, who shrugged. The doctor only cracked open bodies and minds; he was not responsible for what was found.

THE DOCTOR

How did his father die?

THE COMMISSAR

A bullet in the head, listening to his assassin’s confession.

THE COMMANDANT

I wouldn’t put it past you to make up this story to save him.

THE COMMISSAR

Ask my agent. She arranged the father’s death.

The commandant gazed down at me. If I could be guilty of doing nothing, shouldn’t I also be deserving of wanting something? In this case, my father’s death. This father, in the commandant’s atheistic mind, was a colonizer, a dealer in the opiate of the masses, a spokesman for a God for whom millions of dark-skinned people had been sacrificed, supposedly for their own salvation, a burning cross lighting their hard road to Heaven. His death was not murder but a just sentence, which was all that I had ever wanted to write.

THE COMMANDANT

I’ll think about it.

The commandant turned and departed, the doctor obediently following, leaving Sonny and the crapulent major to watch as the commissar slowly settled into the chair with a grimace.

THE COMMISSAR

What a pair we are.

MYSELF

Turn off the lights. I can’t see.

THE COMMISSAR

What is more precious than independence and freedom?

MYSELF

Happiness?

THE COMMISSAR

What is more precious than independence and freedom?

MYSELF

Love?

THE COMMISSAR

What is more precious than independence and freedom?

MYSELF

I don’t know!

THE COMMISSAR

What is more precious than independence and freedom?

MYSELF

I wish I was dead!

There, I had said it, sobbing and howling. Now, at last, I knew what it was that I wanted for myself, what so many people wanted for me. Sonny and the crapulent major applauded in approval, while the commissar drew his pistol. At last! Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt. The sound of the bullet loading into the chamber was as clear as the bell of my father’s church, which my mother and I heard from our hovel every Sunday morning. Looking down on my self, I could still see the child in the man and the man in the child. I was ever always divided, although it was only partially my fault. While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do — no, it was truly impossible, for how could I choose me against myself? Now my friend would release me from this small world with its small-minded people, those mobs who treated a man with two minds and two faces as a freak, who wanted only one answer for any question.

But wait — what was he doing? He had put the gun on the floor and knelt by my side, untying the sack around my right hand, then untying the rope binding it. I saw myself holding my hand before my eyes, scored with the red mark of our brotherhood. Through those subhuman eyes and through my supernatural gaze above, I saw my friend place the pistol in my hand, a Tokarev. The Soviets had based their design on the American Colt, and while its weight was not unfamiliar, I could not hold the pistol upright on my own, forcing my friend to wrap my fingers around the grip.

THE COMMISSAR

You are the only one who can do this for me. Will you?

And here he leaned forward, pressing the muzzle between his eyes, his hands steadying my own.

MYSELF

Why are you doing this?

As I spoke, I cried. He, too, wept, tears rolling down the hideous absence of a face that I had not seen this close in years. Where was the brother of my youth, vanished from everywhere except my memory? There, and only there, his earnest face remained, serious and idealistic, with high, pronounced cheekbones; thin, narrow lips; an aristocratic, slim nose; and an expansive brow hinting at a powerful intelligence whose tidal force had worn away the hairline. All that was left to be recognized were the eyes, kept alive by tears, and the timbre of his voice.

THE COMMISSAR

I’m crying because I can hardly bear to see you so afflicted. But I cannot save you except to have you afflicted. The commandant would not have it otherwise.

At this I laughed, although the body on the mattress only trembled.

MYSELF

How is this saving me?

He smiled through his tears. I recognized the smile, too, the whitest I had ever seen among any of my people, befitting a dentist’s son. What had changed was not the smile but the face, or the lack of it, so that this white smile floated in a void, the horrible grin of a Cheshire cat.