The Sympathizer (50 page)

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.

THE COMMISSAR

We are in an impossible situation. The commandant will let you leave only when you redeem yourself. But what about Bon? And even if he can leave, what will you two do?

MYSELF

If Bon can’t leave . . . neither can I.

THE COMMISSAR

And so you will die here.

He pressed the barrel of the gun against his head even harder.

THE COMMISSAR

Shoot me first. Not because of my face. I would not die for its sake. I would only exile myself here so that my family need never see this
thing
again. But I would live.

I was no longer my body or myself, I was only the gun, and through its steel came the vibrations of his words, signaling the impending arrival of a locomotive that would crush us both.

THE COMMISSAR

I am the commissar, but what kind of school do I oversee? One in which you, of all people, are reeducated. It is not because you did nothing that you are here. It is because you are too educated that you are being reeducated. But what have you learned?

MYSELF

I watched and did nothing!

THE COMMISSAR

I will tell you what cannot be found in any book. In every town, village, and ward the cadres deliver the same lectures. They reassure those citizens not in reeducation of our good intentions. But the committees and the commissars do not care about remaking these prisoners. Everyone knows this and no one will say it aloud. All the jargon that the cadres spout only hides an awful truth—

MYSELF

I wanted my father dead!

THE COMMISSAR

Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine.

The glare above my body was blinding. I was no longer certain whether I could see everything or nothing, and under the heat of the lights my palm was slick with perspiration. My grip on the pistol was slippery, but the commissar’s hands held the barrel in place.

THE COMMISSAR

If anyone besides you knew that I had spoken the unspeakable, I would be reeducated. But it is not reeducation that I fear. It is the education I have that terrifies me. How can a teacher live teaching something he does not believe in? How do I live seeing you like this? I cannot. Now pull the trigger.

I think I said that I would rather shoot myself first, but I could not hear myself, and when I tried to pull the gun away from his head and turn it toward my own, I did not have the strength. Those relentless eyes stared down at me, now dry as bones, and from somewhere deep inside of him came a rumble. Then the rumble burst forth, and he was laughing. What was so funny? This black comedy? No, that was too heavy. This illuminated room allowed for only a light comedy, a white comedy where one could die from laughter, not that he laughed that long. He stopped laughing when he let go of my hand, my arm dropping to my side and the pistol clattering on the cement floor. Behind the commissar, Sonny and the crapulent major stared with longing at the Tokarev. Either one would have been happy to pick it up and shoot me if he could, but they no longer possessed their bodies. As for the commissar and I, we had bodies but could not shoot, and perhaps that made the commissar laugh. The void that had been his face still loomed above me, his hilarity having passed with such rapidity I was not sure I had heard correctly. I thought I saw sadness in that void, but I could not be certain. Only the eyes and teeth expressed any emotion, and he no longer cried or smiled.

THE COMMISSAR

I apologize. That was selfish and weak of me. If I died, you would die, and then Bon. The commandant can’t wait to drag him before the firing squad. At least now you can save yourself and our friend, if not me. That I can live with.

MYSELF

Please, can we talk of this after I sleep?

THE COMMISSAR

First answer my question.

MYSELF

But why?

The commissar holstered his pistol. Then he tied my free hand down once more and stood up. He gazed down on me from a great height, and perhaps it was because of the foreshortened angle, but I saw in his absence of a face something else besides horror . . . a faint shadow cast by madness, although perhaps it was merely an ocular effect created by the glare behind his head.

THE COMMISSAR

My friend, the commandant may let you go because you wanted your father dead, but I will let you go only when you can answer my question. Just remember, my brother, that I do this for your own good.

He raised his hand to me in farewell, and on his palm blazed the red mark of our oath. With that, he left. Those are the most dangerous words you can hear, Sonny said, sitting down on the vacated chair. The crapulent major joined him, pushing him aside for room. “For your own good” can only mean something bad, he said. As if on cue, the speakers mounted high in the corners clicked and hummed, the ones I had only noticed when the commissar played for me my own stranger’s voice. The question of what would be done to me was answered when somebody began screaming, and while Sonny and the crapulent major could clap their hands over their ears I could not. But even with ears protected, Sonny and the crapulent major could not endure this screaming for more than a minute, this shrieking of a baby in torment, and in the blink of an eye they, too, vanished.

Somewhere a baby was screaming, its suffering shared with me, who needed no more. I saw myself squeeze my eyes shut, as if that could also squeeze my ears shut. It was impossible to think with the screaming in this examination room, and for the first time in a very long time I wanted something more than sleep. I wanted silence. Oh, please—I heard myself crying this aloud—stop! Then another click, and the screaming ceased. A tape! I was listening to a tape. No baby was being tortured in some nearby chamber, its howls piped into mine. It was just a recording, and for a few more moments I only had to worry about the unceasing light and heat and the rubber band snap of the electric wire against my little toe. But then I heard the click again, and my body clenched in anticipation. Somebody began screaming once more. Somebody was screaming so loudly that I not only lost track of myself, I lost track of time. Time no longer ran straight as a railroad; time no longer rotated on a dial; time no longer crawled under my back; time was infinitely looping, a cassette tape repeating without end; time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwaches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history. We were, all of us, running out of time, except for the malevolent baby. The baby who was screaming had all the time in the world, and the irony was that the baby did not even know it.