The Sympathizer

So I’ve heard, said the representative. The family is everything. Like us Italians.

Yes, you Italians! The Asian must think of his mother, his father. His siblings, his grandparents. His cousins, his village. If word got out of my good luck . . . it would be endless. The favors. The requests for fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there. Hands tugging at me from all directions. I could not decline. So you see the situation I find myself in. It would be better to take none of the money. I would spare myself these emotional hardships. Or the alternative. To have enough money to take care of all those favors as well as myself.

The representative waited for me to continue, but I waited for him to reply. At last he gave in and said, Not being aware of the complications of Asian families, I am also not aware of the appropriate sum that might satisfy all your familial obligations, which I understand are important to your culture, and which I respect greatly.

I waited for him to continue, but he waited for me to reply. I cannot be certain, I said. But although without certainty, I believe twenty thousand dollars would suffice. To satisfy any needs of my relatives. Anticipated and unanticipated.

Twenty thousand dollars? The representative’s eyebrows performed a graceful yoga pose, arching their backs in disturbingly steep concern. Oh, if you only knew the actuarial charts as I know them! For twenty thousand dollars you must lose at least a finger or, preferably, a larger appendage. If we are speaking of less visible matters, a vital organ or one of your five senses will do.

But in fact, ever since I had awoken from the explosion, something had been nagging at me that I could not name, an itch that was not physical. Now I knew what it was—I had forgotten something, but what that something was, I did not know. Of the three types of forgetting, this was the worst. To know what one had forgotten was common, as was the case with dates of history, mathematical formulas, and people’s names. To forget without knowing one has forgotten must be even more common, or maybe less, but it is merciful: in this case one cannot realize what is lost. But to know that one has forgotten something without knowing what that something was made me shudder. I have lost something, I said, pain getting the better of me and making itself audible in my voice. I’ve lost a piece of my mind.

Violet and the representative exchanged glances. I’m afraid I don’t understand, he said.

A portion of my memory, I said, completely erased, from the explosion until now.

Unfortunately, you may find that hard to prove.

How to prove to someone else that one has forgotten something, or that one has known something and now no longer knows it? Nevertheless, I persisted with the representative. Even in my bedridden state, the old instincts remained. Like rolling one’s own cigarettes, or rolling one’s R’s, lying was a skill and a habit not easily forgotten. This was true also for the representative, whose kindred tricky spirit I recognized. In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected. All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth, and our conversation continued thus until we agreed on the mutually acceptable sum of ten thousand dollars, which, if being only half what I asked for, was twice their original offer. After the representative wrote a new check, I signed the documents and we traded farewell pleasantries that were worth as little as the trading cards of unknown baseball players. At the door, Violet paused with her hand on the knob, looked over her shoulder at me—was there ever a more romantic pose, even with a woman such as her?—and said, You know we couldn’t have done this movie without you.