The Sympathizer

Is that true for old soldiers, too? she asked, not looking impressed. Of course it’s true, Sonny said. If they didn’t go to sleep, how else would they dream? I almost answered before I realized it was a rhetorical question.

Ms. Mori offered me her cheek to kiss and Sonny offered me his hand to shake. He showed me the door and I slid home through the cool sheets of night and into my own bed, Bon asleep and hovering above me in his rack. I closed my eyes and, after a spell of darkness, floated on my mattress across a black river to the foreign country that needed no passport to visit. Of its many gnomic features and shady denizens I now recall only one, my mind wiped clean except for this fatal fingerprint, an ancient kapok tree that was my final resting place and on whose arthritic bark I laid my cheek. I was almost asleep within my sleep when I gradually understood that the knot of gnarled wood on which my ear rested was actually an ear itself, curled and stiff, the wax of its auditory history encrusted in the green moss of its twisted canal. Half of the kapok tree towered above me, half was invisible below me in the rooted earth, and when I looked up I saw not just one ear but many ears swelling from the bark of its thick trunk, hundreds of ears listening and having listened to things I could not hear, the sight of those ears so horrible it hurled me back into the black river. I woke drenched and gasping, clutching the sides of my head. Only after I kicked off the damp sheets and looked under the pillow could I lie down again, trembling. My heart still beat with the force of a savage drummer, but at least my bed was not littered with amputated ears.





CHAPTER 14



Sometimes the work of a subversive is purposeful, but sometimes, I confess, it is accidental. In retrospect, perhaps my questioning of Sonny’s courage pushed him to write the headline that I saw two weeks after the field maneuvers, “Move On, War Over.” I saw it on the General’s desk in his war room at the liquor store, fixed squarely on the writing pad and weighed down by a stapler. The sentiments of the headline might be hailed by some, but certainly not by the General. Beneath that headline was a photograph of a rally staged by the Fraternity at a Westminster park, with ranks and files of grim veterans in paramilitary uniforms of brown shirts and red berets. In another photo, civilians in the cast-off couture of refugees waved signs and clutched banners with the telegraphic messages of political protests. HO CHI MINH = HITLER! FREEDOM FOR OUR PEOPLE! THANK YOU, AMERICA! To the degree that the article might sow doubt in the hearts of exiles about continuing the war, and create divisions among exile factions, I knew that my provocation of Sonny had had an unintentional, but desirable, effect.