The Sympathizer

You should go? From the expression on her face, it was clear she had never heard those words before from a man. She would not have looked so astonished if I had asked her to commit the most heinous acts of Sodom. I stood up before I changed my mind, handing her the guitar. There’s something I must do. Before I can do what needs to be done here. It was her turn to recline, amused, and strum a dramatic chord. Sounds serious, she said. But you know what? I like serious men.

If only she knew how serious I could be. I drove the hour between her apartment and Sonny’s with my hands at ten and two o’clock, breathing deeply and methodically to quell my regret at leaving Lana and my nervousness at meeting him. Breathing mindfully was a lesson Claude had taught me, learned from the practices of our Buddhist monks. Everything came down to focusing on the breath. Slowly exhaling and inhaling, one cleared away life’s white noise, leaving one’s mind free and peaceful to be one with the object of its contemplation. When subject and object are the same, Claude said, you don’t shake when you squeeze the trigger. By the time I parked my car around the corner from Sonny’s apartment, my mind was a gull gliding over a beach, carried not by its own will or movement but by the breeze. I took off my blue polo shirt and slipped on a white T-shirt. I kicked off my brown loafers and removed my khakis, then pulled on a pair of blue jeans and beige canvas shoes. Last to go on was a reversible windbreaker, the plaid side exposed, and a fedora. Leaving the car, I carried with me a free tote bag I had received for subscribing to Time magazine, inside of which was a small backpack, the clothes I had just shed, a baseball cap, a blond wig, a pair of tinted glasses, and a black Walther P22 with a silencer. The General had given Bon an envelope of cash, and with it Bon had bought the pistol and silencer from the same Chinese gang that had supplied him with the .38. Then he had made me rehearse the plan with him until I had memorized it.

The sidewalk was barren from car to apartment. Walking the streets was not an American custom, as I had confirmed after observing the neighborhood several times. It was a little past nine o’clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original. I rang the intercom. All?? he said. When I announced my presence, there was a slight pause before he said, I’ll buzz you in. I took the stairs instead of the elevator to avoid meeting anyone. On the second floor, I peeked into the hallway to make sure no one was there. He opened the door a second after I knocked.

The apartment smelled like home, the scents of fried fish, steamed white rice, and cigarette smoke. I know why you’re here, he said as I sat down on his couch. I clutched the tote bag. Why am I here? I said. Sofia, he said, as serious as I was even though his feet were in fuzzy pink slippers. He wore sweatpants and a gray cardigan. On the dining table behind him hunkered a typewriter with a lip of paper dangling from its roller, the machine abutted by haphazard mounds of documents. Under the dining table’s chandelier, above an ashtray, floated a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, the exhaust from Sonny’s active brain. And on the wall above the table, through that scrim, hung the same clock as in the General and Madame’s restaurant, also set to Saigon time.