In hindsight, one could view my actions as solid textbook. Inelegantly executed, perhaps, but effective. I wasn’t employing a technique so much as my own instant live burial. It’s the prerogative of moles, after all, which only certain American lifetimes can teach. I am the obedient, soft-spoken son. What other talent can Hoagland so prize? I will duly retreat to the position of the good volunteer, the invisible underling. I have always known that moment of disappearance, and the even uglier truth is that I have long treasured it. That always honorable-seeming absence. It appears I can go anywhere I wish. Is this my assimilation, so many years in the making? Is this the long-sought sweetness?
I have tried to heed Jack. I go faithfully to the flat to write out my reports. For the first days since the beginning I can write three or four pages on my subject and then another page of breezy analysis in less than an hour. I am supposed to do it this way, precisely but fast, checking off the day hour by hour the way a bright-eyed kid might reel off what he just got for Christmas. If I pore over the events too long, Hoagland always reminded me, I might get the proportions wrong, lend an act or word a note of too much significance and weight.
I am to be a clean writer, of the most reasonable eye, and present the subject in question like some sentient machine of transcription. In the commentary, I won’t employ anything that even smacks of theme or moral. I will know nothing of the crafts of argument or narrative or drama. Nothing of beauty or art. And I am to stay on my uncomplicated task of rendering a man’s life and ambition and leave to the unseen experts the arcana of human interpretation. The palmistry, the scriptology, the rest of their esoterica. The deep science.
I will simply know character. Identity. This is the all. I am to follow like a starved dog the entrails of any personal affect. I will uncover and invoke inclinations and aversions. Mannerisms of mind. Tics of his life. His opinions, prejudices, insecurities, vanities. Even the piques of his palate, if they speak to anything. What I am paid to do is to observe him in a rigorous present tense, as a subject dynamically inhabiting a scene, as a phenomenon of study.
And I will build all these up into the daily log of his life, into a secret book of personality that I care nothing for except that I necessarily remember everything in it, every voice and detail, and then remember again all of the books before, of Luzan and the others, those inalienable texts the blocks of a cruel palace of memory in which I now live.
But one night last week, after a full day of escorting him to district meetings and fund-raisers, I realized that Kwang presented a profound problem for me. I couldn’t write the usual about him, at least in that automatic, half-conscious way. I had trouble again. I could not picture him. It seemed I had no profile from which to work. I was prolific, however, I wrote other pieces, entire tracts on him, tones and notes of him, but nothing I could use. I transmitted what I had on hand, two or three pages of vague and aimless reporting, and on the following nights I’d have the replies waiting for me and I’d print them out, mostly blank pages typed with terse messages like: Get with it, son, and You know better than this.
For Hoagland’s is a constant prerogative: You know better, Harry. Be the scribe. The eye. Just point and pull the trigger. You’ll hit something.
Certainly, a strange thing is happening. My recollection and sight are focusing elsewhere now. I am seeing a different story. As I flesh out the day’s register, as I am tonight, I feel as if I am desperately prospecting for an alibi, one mine more than Kwang’s. The teller, I know, can keep his face in the shadows only so long. We want him to come out, step into the light, bare himself. This is the shape of our era.
And what — if I recall correctly — did Dr. Luzan say to me at one of our meetings, in his wheezing singsong voice, but Who, my young friend, have you been all your life?
The good doctor knew the story. He could immediately see. A close look into my face and he could read the insistent question. He always spoke to me of my development. I remember his asking if I had had any heroes growing up, figures actual or imagined that I cherished, admired. Besides your father, he added. I laughed. So I told him of my invisible brother with no name.
“Why didn’t your invisible brother have a name?” Luzan asked me, sitting placidly as always behind his metal office desk.
I told him how I didn’t know the subtle nuances or meanings of Korean names, even though I knew quite a few, that it would have been like naming someone purely by sound. And he wouldn’t want an American name, because everybody else had one, because it was all so ordinary, even if convenient. I described him for the doctor, his walking before me in the schoolyard, stamping the blacktop, announcing our presence with his swagger, his shout. He knew karate, kung fu, tae kwon do, jujitsu. He could beat up the big black kids if he wished, the tough Puerto Rican kids, anyone else who called us names or made slanty eyes. The white boys admired him for his athleticism, how far past the fence he could send a kickball. The white girls were especially fond of him. He often kissed them after school, in front of everyone. He knew all about science, about model rocketry, chemistry sets, baseball cards, about American history. He was the lead in the school play. He spoke a singing beautiful English. He made public speeches. My mother and father were so proud of him. He was better than anyone. He was perfect. In my imagination these blinding halos of terror and beauty rung him, or maybe they were the same, as though he were limited somehow by his own unbearable preeminence and in that way given over to a doom in his life. In the daytime I could feel him near me, sense not so much his friendship but his vigilance and guidance, the veil of his cover. But at night, alone in my bed, my stomach would burn, ache anxiously for his well-being. I feared he would perish in some accident wherever he was (when he didn’t need to be with me), that he was going to die tragically, drown in a lake or slip and fall off a cliff; it wouldn’t be his fault, it wouldn’t be anyone’s, just that it would happen without warning or reason. And soon I’d find myself knotted into a hard coil in the bed, the points of my knees jabbing back the stabs of worry in my stomach and chest, and I wondered if in the morning after I left the house for the long walk to school he would be there for me, at my flank again, that comely wall of him, talking his trash and his resplendence, talking me up, too, talking my story.
Luzan always preferred that I speak to him in skeins such as this; he urged me to take up story-forms, even prepare something for our sessions. His method with me was in fact anti-associative, and he asked me to look at my life not just from a singular mode but through the crucible of a larger narrative. He said he could learn much about me from the way I saw myself working in the world. Is this what I have left of the doctor? That I no longer can simply flash a light inside a character, paint a figure like Kwang with a momentary language, but that I know the greater truths reside in our necessary fictions spanning human event and time?
I know that on this one Hoagland would agree: to be a true spy of identity, he often said, you must be a spy of the culture.
On what turned out to be my last meeting with Luzan I went over the appointed fifty minutes. He did not stop me. He instructed his secretary through the squawky intercom that she clear the rest of his afternoon. He calmed me, patting my hand like an old woman. He wondered why I seemed unusually agitated today, and asked if anything was wrong.
“No,” I told him, “but next time will be my last session.”