The Sympathizer

If it were all so simple. The problem with killing all the Viet Cong was that there would always be more, teeming in the walls of our minds, breathing heavily under the floorboards of our souls, orgiastically reproducing out of our sight. The other problem was that Sonny was not VC, for a subversive would not, by definition, have a big mouth. But maybe I was wrong. An agent provocateur was a subversive, and his task was to shoot his mouth off, agitating others in the spin cycle of radicalization. In that case, however, the agent provocateur here would not be a communist, spurring the anticommunists to organize against him. He would be an anticommunist, encouraging like-minded people to go too far, dizzy with ideological fervor, rancid with resentment. By that definition, the most likely agent provocateur was the General. Or the Madame. Why not? Man assured me we had people in the highest ranks. You’ll be surprised who gets the medals after the liberation, he said. Would I now? The joke would be on me if the General and Madame were sympathizers, too. A joke we could all laugh at when we were commemorated as Heroes of the People.

With Bon’s counsel stashed away, I turned for solace to the only other person whom I could speak to, Lana. I came to her apartment the next week with a bottle of wine. At home she she looked like a college student in her UC Berkeley sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and the lightest of makeup. She cooked like one, too, but no matter. We ate dinner in the living room while watching The Jeffersons, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. Afterward we drank another bottle of wine, which helped to soften the heavy lumps of starch in our tummies. I pointed toward the illuminated architectural masterpieces on a hill in the distance, visible through her window, and told her that one of them belonged to the Auteur, whose opus was soon to be released. I had already recounted my misadventures in the Philippines and my suspicion, however paranoid, that the Auteur had tried to kill me. I’ll admit, I told her, that I’ve fantasized about killing him once or twice. She shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette. We all fantasize about killing people, she said. Just a passing thought, like, oh, what if I ran over that person with a car. Or at least we fantasize what it would be like if someone were dead. My mother, for example. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . right? Don’t leave me feeling like I’m crazy here. I had her guitar on my lap, and I strummed a dramatic Spanish chord. Since we’re confessing, I said, I’ve thought about killing my father. Not really, of course, but just what if . . . Did I ever tell you he was a priest? Her eyes opened wide. A priest? My God!

Her sincere shock endeared her to me. Underneath the nightclub makeup and artificial diva gloss she was still innocent, so unsullied that all I wanted was to rub the emollient, creamy pulp of my ecstatic self onto her soft white skin. I wanted to replicate the oldest dialectic of all with her, the thesis of Adam and the antithesis of Eve that led to the synthesis of us, the rotten apple of humanity, fallen so far from God’s tree. Not that we were even as pure as our first parents. If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve, so that what I really wanted was the steamy, hot, jungle dialectic of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Were either of these couplings any better than a Vietnamese girl and a French priest? My mother used to tell me nothing was wrong with being the love child of such a pair, I told Lana. After all, Mama said, we are a people born from the mating of a dragon and a fairy. What could be stranger than that? But people looked down on me all the same, and I blamed my father. When I was growing up, I fantasized that one day he would stand before the congregation and say, Here is my son that you may know him. Let him come before you that you should recognize him and love him as I love him. Or some such thing. I’d have been happy if he would just visit and eat with us and call me son in secret. But he never did, so I fantasized about a lightning bolt, a mad elephant, a fatal disease, an angel descending behind him at the pulpit and blowing a trumpet in his ear to call him back to his Maker.

That’s not fantasizing about killing him.

Oh, but I did, with a gun.

But have you forgiven him?

Sometimes I think I have. Sometimes I think I haven’t, especially when I think of my mother. That means, I suppose, that I haven’t really forgiven him.

Lana leaned forward then, resting her hand on my knee. Perhaps forgiveness is overrated, she said. Her face was closer to me than ever before, and all I need do was lean forward. It was then I committed the most perverse act of my life. I declined, or rather, I reclined, putting distance between me and that beautiful face, the tempting crevice of those slightly parted lips. I should go, I said.