The Sympathizer

CHAPTER 21

The prisoner had never known that he needed a respite from history, he who had committed his adult life to its hot pursuit. His friend Man had introduced him to the science of history in the study group, its chosen books written in scarlet letters. If one understood history’s laws, then one could control history’s chronology, wresting it away from capitalism, already intent on monopolizing time. We wake, work, eat, and sleep according to what the landlord, the owner, the banker, the politician, and the schoolmaster command, Man had said. We accept that our time belongs to them, when in truth our time belongs to us. Awaken, peasants, workers, colonized! Awaken, invisible ones! Stir from your zones of occult instability and steal the gold watch of time from the paper tigers, running dogs, and fat cats of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism! If you know how to steal it, time is on your side, and numbers are, too. There are millions of you and only thousands of them, the colonizers, compradors, and capitalists who have persuaded the wretched of the earth that capitalist history is inevitable. We, the vanguard, must convince the dark peoples and subterranean classes that communist history is inevitable! The exhaustion of the exploited will inevitably lead them to revolt, but it is our vanguard that speeds up the time toward that uprising, resets the clock of history and rings the alarm clock of revolution. Ticktock — ticktock — ticktock—

Fixed on his mattress, the prisoner — no, the pupil — understood that this was the study group’s final session. To be a revolutionary subject he must be a historical subject who remembered all, which he could do so only by being fully awake, even if being fully awake would, eventually, kill him. And yet if he could but sleep, he would understand better! He writhed, he wriggled, he wrestled with himself in his failed bid for sleep, and this may have gone on for hours, or minutes, or seconds, when, all of a sudden, his hood was removed, followed by his gag, allowing him to gasp and suck in air. His captor’s rough hands plucked away his muffs and earplugs and, lastly, untied the blindfold chafing against his skin. Light! He could see, but just as quickly he had to shut his eyes. Suspended over him were dozens — no, hundreds of lightbulbs, planted in the ceiling and blinding him with their collective wattage, their glare radiating through the red filter of his eyelids. A foot pushed against his temple and the baby-faced guard said, No sleeping, you. He opened his eyes to the glowing hot mass of bulbs arranged in an orderly grid, their intense light revealing an examination room whose walls and ceiling were plastered in white. The floor was cement painted white, and even the iron door was painted white, all in a chamber roughly three meters by five. The baby-faced guard in his yellow uniform stood at attention in the corner, but the three others in the room stood at the edges of his mattress, one to either side and another at his feet. They were dressed in white lab coats and sea-green medical scrubs, hands behind their backs. Surgical masks and stainless steel goggles hid their faces, all six orbital lenses focused on him, who was now clearly not only prisoner and pupil but also patient.

Q. Who are you?

The man to his left asked the question. Didn’t they know who he was by now? He was the man with a plan, the spy with an eye, the mole in the hole, but his tongue had inflated itself to fill his entire mouth. Please, he wanted to say, let me close my eyes. Then I’ll tell you who I am. The answer is on the tip of my tongue — I am the gook being cooked. And if you say I am only half a gook? Well, in the words of that blond-haired major tasked with counting the communist dead after the battle for Ben Tre, confronted with the mathematical problem of a corpse whose remains included only his head, chest, and arms: half a gook is still a gook. And since the only good gook is a dead gook, as the American soldiers liked to say, it must be that this patient was one bad gook.

Q. What are you?

This came from the man to his right in the commandant’s voice. On hearing this voice, the patient lunged against his ropes until they burned his flesh, the question inciting a red flare of silent rage. I know what you’re thinking! You think I’m a traitor! A counterrevolutionary! A bastard who belongs nowhere, not to be trusted by anyone! The rage subsided just as suddenly into despair, and he wept. Would his sacrifices never be honored? Would no one ever understand him? Would he always be alone? Why must he be the man to whom things are done?

Q. What is your name?

It was the man at the end of the mattress, speaking in the commissar’s voice. An easy question, or so he thought. He opened his mouth, but when his tongue would not move, he shrank in fright. Had he forgotten his name? No, impossible! He had given himself his American name. As for his native name, his mother, the only one who understood him, had given it to him, his father no help, his father who never called him son or by his name, even in class simply calling him you. No, he could never forget his name, and when at last it came to him, he freed his tongue from its gummy bed and said it aloud.

The commissar said, He can’t even get his name right. Doctor, I think he needs the serum, to which the man on the patient’s left said, Very well, then. The doctor brought his hands from behind his back, gloved to the forearms in white rubber, one hand with an ampule the size of a rifle cartridge, the other with a needle. With a smooth stroke, the doctor drew a clear liquid from the ampule into the needle, then crouched by the patient’s side. When he shuddered and twitched, the doctor said, One way or another I’ll inject you, and if you move, it will be worse for you. The patient stopped thrashing and the prick in the crook of the elbow was almost a welcome relief, another kind of feeling than the hallucinatory urge for sleep. Almost, but not quite. Please, he said, turn off the lights.

The commissar said, That we cannot do. Don’t you see that you must see? The commandant snorted. He will never see, not with all the light in the world. He’s been underground too long. He’s fundamentally blind! Now, now, said the doctor, patting the patient’s arm. Men of science must never give up hope, least of all when operating on the mind. As we can neither see nor touch his mind, all we can do is help the patient see his own mind by keeping him awake, until he can observe himself as someone else. This is most crucial, for we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It’s as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can. This is the nature of our experiment, for which we need one more device. The doctor pointed to a brown leather satchel on the floor that the patient had not noticed but immediately recognized, a military field telephone, the sight of which made him tremble again. The Soviets provided the serum that will compel our patient to tell the truth, the doctor said. This other component is American. You see the look in our patient’s eyes? He remembers what he has seen in those interrogation rooms. But we will not be wiring him via nipple and scrotum to the battery terminals on the phone’s generator. Instead — the doctor reached into the satchel and extracted a black wire — we clip this to a toe. As for the hand crank, it generates too much electricity. We do not want pain. We do not torture. All we want is enough stimulus to keep him awake. Thus I have modified the electrical output and wired the phone to this. The doctor held up a wristwatch. Every time the second hand crosses twelve o’clock, a brief spark travels to the patient’s toe.

The doctor untied the burlap sack of wadding from around the patient’s foot, and although the patient craned his neck to see the doctor’s contraption he could not elevate himself enough to observe the details. All he could see was the black wire running from toe to satchel, inside of which the doctor had replaced the wristwatch. Sixty seconds, gentlemen, said the doctor. Ticktock. . the patient trembled, waiting for the call. The patient had seen how a subject receiving such a call answered it by screaming and flinging about. By the tenth or twentieth such call, the subject’s eyes took on the glassy sheen of a taxidermically prepared specimen in a diorama, living and yet dead, or vice versa, as the subject anticipated the crank’s next turn. Claude, who had taken the class to see such an interrogation, said, Any of you jokers laugh or get a hard-on, I yank you. This is serious business. The patient remembered being relieved when he was not asked to turn the crank. Watching the subject spasm, he had winced and wondered what the call felt like. Now here he was, sweating and shivering as the seconds ticked away until a burst of static electricity made him jump, not pained but startled. See? Perfectly harmless, said the doctor. Just keep switching the wire to different toes so he doesn’t get a burn from the wire’s clip.

Thank you, Doctor, said the commissar. Now if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like some privacy with our patient. Take all the time you want, said the commandant, heading for the door. This patient’s mind is contaminated. It needs a thorough washing. After the exit of the commandant, the doctor, and the baby-faced guard — but not Sonny and the crapulent major, who observed the patient with great patience as they stood in one corner — the commissar sat down on a wooden chair, the only furnishing in the room besides the patient’s mattress. Please, the patient said, just let me rest. The commissar said nothing until the next burst of static electricity jarred the patient. Then he leaned forward and showed the patient a thin book heretofore hidden from him. We found this in your quarters at the General’s villa.

Q. What is the title?

A.

KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation

, 1963.

Q. What is

KUBARK

?

A. A cryptonym for the CIA.

Q. What is the CIA?

A. The Central Intelligence Agency of the USA.

Q. What is the USA?

A. The United States of America.

You see that I hide nothing from you, the commissar said, leaning back. I have read your marginal notes, taken account of your underlined passages. Everything being done to you comes from this book. In other words, yours is an open-book exam. There are no surprises.

Sleep. .

No. I am observing you to see if this serum is working. A gift from the KGB, although we both know what the great powers expect for their gifts. They have tested their techniques, their weapons, and their ideas on our small country. We have been the subjects of that experiment they call, with a straight face, the Cold War. What a joke, given how hot the war has been for us! Funny but not so funny, for you and I are together the butt of this joke. (I thought we were the butt of the joke, said Sonny. Hush, said the crapulent major. I want to hear this. It’s going to be rich!) As always, the commissar continued, we have appropriated their techniques and technology. These lightbulbs? Manufactured in the USA, and the generator that powers them as well, although the gasoline is a Soviet import.

Please, turn off the lights, the patient said, sweating from the heat generated by the grid of bulbs. Hearing no response, he repeated himself, and when he still heard nothing, he realized that the commissar had left. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he thought he was asleep, until the electricity bit his toe. I’ve been subjected to these techniques myself at the Farm, Claude had told the class. They work even if you know what is being done to you. He was referring to the techniques in the mimeographed KUBARK manual now in the commissar’s hands, the required reading for the interrogation course. The patient, before he was a patient and when he was only a pupil, had read this book several times. He had memorized its plot, characters, and devices, and he understood the importance of isolation, sensory deprivation, joint interrogators, and penetration agents. He had mastered the Ivan Is a Dope technique, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing technique, the Alice in Wonderland technique, the All-Seeing Eye technique, the Nobody Loves You technique. In short, he knew this book inside and out, including its stress on an unpredictable routine. Thus it was no surprise when the baby-faced guard came in and reattached the wire to one of his fingers. While the baby-faced guard was rewrapping his foot, the patient mumbled something even he did not understand, to which the baby-faced guard said nothing at all. This baby-faced guard was the one who had shown the patient his tattoo, BORN IN THE NORTH TO DIE IN THE SOUTH, scripted in blue ink on his biceps. As he was in the last division to march on Saigon, however, the war was over by the time he arrived to liberate the city. But his tattoo might still be prophetic. He had nearly died already from the syphilis given to him by a prisoner’s visiting wife, who had paid her bribe with the only resource she had. Please, turn off the lights, the patient said. But the baby-faced guard was no longer tending to him. It was a teenage guard, delivering his food. Hadn’t he just eaten? He wasn’t hungry, but the teenage guard forced the rice gruel down his throat with a metal spoon. The schedule of his basic necessities must be disrupted, his feeding schedule irregular and unpredictable, exactly according to the book. Like a doctor studying a fatal disease that suddenly afflicts him, he knew everything that had happened and would happen to him, and yet it made no difference. He attempted to tell this to the teenage guard, who told him to shut up before kicking him in the ribs and leaving. The electric wire bit him again, only this time it was not clipped to his finger but to his ear. He shook his head but the wire would not release its jaws, nagging at him to stay awake. His mind was raw and chapped, as his mother’s nipples must have been after he fed on them. My hungry baby, she called him. Just a few hours old, you couldn’t even open your eyes and yet you knew exactly where to find my milk. And once you latched on, you wouldn’t let go! You demanded it every hour on the hour. That first soupçon of his mother’s milk must have been perfection, but he could not remember what it tasted like. All he knew was what it did not taste like: fear, the sharp, metallic tinge of a nine-volt battery rubbed on his tongue.

Q. How do you feel?

The commissar had returned, looming over the patient in his white lab coat, surgical mask, and stainless steel goggles, his hands in white rubber gloves, holding a notepad and a pen.

Q. I said, how are you feeling?

A. I can’t feel my body.

Q. But can you feel your mind?

A. My mind feels everything.

Q. Now do you remember?

A. What?

Q. Do you remember what you have forgotten?

And it occurred to the patient that he did remember what he had forgotten, and that if he could just articulate it, the wire would be removed from the tip of his nose, the taste of a battery in his mouth would go away, the lights would be turned off, and he could, at last, sleep. He wept, his tears falling into the vast waters of his forgetting, and that slight saline change to the liquid constitution of his amnesia provoked the obsidian past to rise. An obelisk slowly emerged from his ocean of disremembering, the resurrection of what he did not even know was dead since it had been buried at sea. Engraved on the obelisk were hieroglyphs — cryptic images of three mice, a series of rectangles, undulating curves, a scattering of kanji. . and a movie projector, for what had been forgotten, he now remembered, had occurred in the room they called the movie theater.

Q. Who called it the movie theater?

A. The policemen.

Q. Why is it called the movie theater?

A. When foreigners visit, the room is a movie theater.

Q. And when foreigners are not visiting?

A. .

Q. And when foreigners are not visiting?

A. Interrogations are done there.

Q. How are interrogations done?

A. There are so many ways.

Q. What is one example?

One example! There were so many to choose from. The telephone call, of course, and the plane ride, and the water drum, and the ingenious, scarless method involving pins, paper, and an electric fan, and the massage, and the lizards, and the spot burns, and the eel. None of them were written in the book. Even Claude did not know their origins, only that they had been practiced long before his entry into the guild. (This is going on for far too long, said the crapulent major. He’s had enough. No, said Sonny. He’s really sweating now. We’re starting to get somewhere!)

Q. Who was in the movie theater?

A. The three policemen. The major. Claude.

Q. Who else was in the movie theater?

A. Me.

Q. Who else was in the movie theater?

A. .

Q. Who else—

A. The communist agent.

Q. What happened to her?

How could he have forgotten the agent with the papier-mâché evidence in her mouth? His own name was written on the list of policemen she had been trying to swallow when she was caught. Watching her in the movie theater, he was certain that she was unaware of his true identity, though he was the one who had passed the list to Man. But the agent, being Man’s courier, knew who Man was. She lay in the center of the capacious room, naked on a table covered with a black rubber sheet, hands and feet roped to the table’s four legs. The movie theater was lit only by overhead fluorescent lighting, its blackout curtains puckered shut. Pushed haphazardly against the walls were gray metal folding chairs, while in the back of the room stood a Sony movie projector. On the opposite wall the movie screen served as the backdrop, from where Claude watched by the projector, of the agent’s interrogation. The crapulent major was in charge, but having abdicated his role to the three policemen in the movie theater, he sat watching from a folding chair, his face unhappy and sweating.

Q. Where were you?

A. With Claude.

Q. What did you do?

A. I watched.

Q. What did you see?

Later, sometime in the bright future, the commissar would play the patient a tape recording of his answer, though he had no memory of the tape recorder’s presence. Many people who heard their voices on tape thought that they did not sound like themselves, which they found disturbing, and he was no exception. He heard this stranger’s voice say, I saw everything. Claude told me that this was nasty business, but that I had to see it. I said, Is this really necessary? Claude said, Talk to the major. He’s in charge. I’m just the adviser. So I went to the major, who said, There’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing! The General wants to know how she got the names and he wants to know now. But this is wrong, I said. Don’t you see? This doesn’t need to be done. The major sat there and said nothing, and Claude, standing by the movie projector, was also silent. Just give me some time alone with her, I said to the three policemen. Although the Americans called our policemen white mice because of their white dress uniforms and hats, none of these three were mouselike. They were average specimens of national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles. Instead of head-to-toe dress whites, they wore field uniforms of white shirts and light blue pants, their light blue caps doffed. Just give me a couple of hours with her, I said. The youngest policeman snorted. He just wants first dibs. I turned red with fury and shame, and the oldest policeman said, The American’s not worrying about this. Neither should you. Here, have a Coke. In the corner was a Frigidaire full of soda, and the oldest policeman, who already had an open bottle in his hand, pressed it into mine before ushering me to the chair next to the major. I sat down and the fingers of my hand, holding the ice-cold bottle, began to go numb.

Please, sirs! cried the agent. I’m innocent! I swear! That explains why you got a list with all those policemen’s names on it? said the youngest. You just found that lying around somewhere and then got so hungry you had to try to eat it? No, no, sobbed the agent. She needed a good story to cover herself but for some reason she could not come up with it, not that any story could divert the policemen. All right, said the middle-aged one, unbuckling his belt and unzipping his pants. He was already erect, his eleventh finger protruding from his boxers. The agent moaned and turned her eyes away to the other side of the table, only to find the youngest policeman standing there. Having already dropped his pants, he was pumping himself furiously with one hand. Sitting behind him, all I saw were the sunken cheeks of his naked buttocks, as well as the horror in the agent’s eyes. She saw that this was not an interrogation but a sentence, written by the policemen with the instruments in their hands. The oldest, who must have been a father, was fondling the stubby length of the ugliest part of most adult male bodies. This was fully evident to me now that the youngest policeman had turned in profile, bringing himself closer to the agent’s face. Come on, take a look, he said. He likes you! The three engorged members differed in length, one pointing up, another down, the third bent to the side. Please don’t do this! the agent cried, eyes shut and head shaking. I beg you! The oldest policeman laughed. Look at that flat nose and dark skin. She’s got some Cambodian in her, or maybe Cham. They’re hot-blooded.

Let’s start easy, the middle-aged policeman said, climbing up awkwardly onto the table between her legs. What’s your name? She said nothing, but when he repeated the question, something primitive awoke in her, and when she opened her eyes to look at the policeman, she said, My surname is Viet and my given name is Nam. For a moment, the three policemen were speechless. Then they burst into laughter. This bitch is asking for it, said the youngest. The middle-aged one, still laughing, ponderously lowered himself onto the agent as she screamed and screamed. Watching the policeman grunting and pounding, and the other two shuffling around the table with their pants around their ankles, ugly knees exposed, it seemed to me that they were, after all, mice, gathered around a block of cheese. My countrymen never understood the concept of a queue, no one wanting to be at the end of a line, and as these three mice jostled one another and obstructed my view, all I could see were their sweaty nether regions and the agent’s thrashing legs. She was no longer screaming becaus she no longer could, the youngest policeman having silenced her. Hurry up, he said. What’s taking so long? I’ll take as long as I please, said the middle-aged one. You’re enjoying yourself with her anyway, aren’t you? (Stop talking about this! cried the crapulent major, clapping his hands over his eyes. I can’t look!) But we were helpless except to watch as the middle-aged policeman at last convulsed with a tremendous spasm. Pleasure of this degree should always be kept private, unless everyone was participating, as in a carnival or an orgy. Here, the pleasure was hideous to those who only looked. My turn, said the youngest, detaching himself from the agent, who was able to scream once more until the oldest took the youngest policeman’s place, silencing her. What a mess, said the youngest, hiking up his shirt. He took his position on the table, undeterred by the mess, and even as the middle-aged policeman zipped up his pants over the frizzy toupee crowning his deflated self, the youngest began repeating his predecessor’s motions, reaching, in a few minutes, the same obscene conclusion. Then it was the oldest policeman’s turn, and when he climbed onto the table, he left me an unimpeded view of the agent’s face. Although she was now free to scream, she no longer did, or no longer could. She was staring directly at me, but with the screws of pain tightened on her jaws and eyes, those screws that turned ever more, I had the feeling she did not see me at all.

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?