CHAPTER 5
Having read many confessions myself, and bearing in mind your notes on what I have confessed thus far, I suspect, my dear Commandant, that this confession is not what you are most likely used to reading. I cannot blame you for the unusual qualities of my confession — only me. I am guilty of honesty, which was rarely the case in my adult life. Why begin now, in these circumstances, a solitary chamber of three by five meters? Perhaps because I do not understand why I am here. At least when I was a sleeper agent, I understood why I had to live my life in code. But not now. If I am to be condemned — if I am already condemned, as I suspect — then I will do no less than explain myself, in a style of my own choosing, regardless of how you might consider my actions.
I should get credit, I think, for the real dangers and petty bothers that I endured. I lived like a bonded servant, a refugee whose only job perk was the opportunity to receive welfare. I barely even had the opportunity to sleep, since a sleeper agent is almost constantly afflicted with insomnia. Perhaps James Bond could slumber peacefully on the bed of nails that was a spy’s life, but I could not. Ironically, it was my most spy-like task to date that could always put me to sleep, the decoding of Man’s messages and the encoding of my own in invisible ink. As each dispatch was painstakingly coded word by word, it behooved sender and receiver to keep messages as brief as possible, and the one that I decoded the next evening from Man said simply: Good work, Deflect attention from yourself, and All subversives now detained.
I saved encoding my response until after the grand opening of the General’s liquor store, which, the General said, Claude would be attending. We had spoken a few times by phone but I had not seen Claude since Saigon. There was another reason the General wanted to see me in person, however, or so Bon reported a few days later on returning from the store. He had just been hired as the store’s clerk, a job he could manage while also cleaning the reverend’s church part-time. I had urged the General to hire Bon, and was glad that he would now spend more hours on his feet than on his back. What does he want to see me for? I said. Bon opened the refrigerator’s arthritic jaw and extracted the most beautiful decorative object in our possession, a gleaming silver cylinder of Schlitz. There’s an informer in the ranks. Beer?
I’ll take two.
The grand opening would be at the end of April, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall, or liberation, or both, of Saigon. It fell on a Friday, and I had to ask Ms. Mori, she of the sensible shoes, if I could leave work early. Although I would not have asked for this favor in September, by April our relationship had taken an unexpected turn. In the months after I started working with her, we had gradually surveilled each other on smoking breaks, on the chats that naturally occur between office mates, and then after work at cocktail hours far from campus. Ms. Mori was not as hostile to me as I had supposed. In fact, we had become rather friendly, if that was the word to describe the sweaty, condomless intercourse we engaged in once or twice per week at her apartment in the Crenshaw neighborhood, the furtive fornication committed once or twice per week in the Department Chair’s office, and the nocturnal relations staged on the squeaky backseat of my Ford.
As she explained after our first romantic interlude, it was my reasonable, kind, good-hearted manner that had eventually persuaded her to invite me for a drink “whenever.” I had taken up the invitation a few days later at a tiki bar in Silver Lake, frequented by heavyset men in Hawaiian shirts and women whose denim skirts barely harnessed their generous rumps. Flaming tiki torches flanked the entrance, while inside, ominous masks of some unknown Pacific Island origin were pinned to the planked wall, their lips seeming to say, Ooga booga. Table lamps in the shape of bare-breasted, brown-skinned hula girls in grass skirts cast an ambient glow. The waitress likewise wore a grass skirt whose faded straw color matched her hair, her bikini top fashioned from polished coconuts. Sometime after our third round, Ms. Mori cupped her chin with her right hand, elbow on the bar, and allowed me to light her cigarette, which, in my opinion, was one of the most erotic acts of foreplay a man can perform for a woman. She drank and smoked like a movie starlet from a screwball comedy, one of those dames with padded bras and shoulder pads who spoke in a second language of innuendo and double entendre. Looking me in the eye, she said, I have a confession. I smiled and hoped my dimples impressed her. I like confessions, I said. There’s something mysterious about you, she said. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you’re tall, dark, and handsome. You’re just dark and sort of cute. At first, hearing about you and meeting you the first time, I thought, Great, here’s an Uncle Tom-a-san, a real sellout, a total whitewash. He’s not a cracker, but he’s close. He’s a rice cracker. The way you get along with the gaijin! White people love you, don’t they? They only like me. They think I’m a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who’s ready to please. But I don’t talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don’t talk the right way. I can’t put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney. You, though. You can talk, and that counts for a lot. But it’s not just that. You’re a great listener. You’ve mastered the inscrutable Oriental smile, sitting there nodding and wrinkling your brow sympathetically and letting people go on, thinking you’re perfectly in agreement with everything they say, all without saying a word yourself. What do you say to that?
Ms. Mori, I said, I am shocked by what I am hearing. I’ll bet, she said. Call me Sofia, for Chrissakes. I’m not your girlfriend’s over-the-hill mother. Get me another drink and light me another cigarette. I’m forty-six years old and I don’t care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she’s wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. It’s got nothing to do with the Kama Sutra or The Carnal Prayer Mat or any of that Oriental hocus-pocus of our beloved Department Chair. You’ve worked for him for six years, I said. And don’t I know it, she said. Is it just my imagination, or does every time he opens the door to his office a gong goes off somewhere? And does he smoke tobacco in his office, or is that incense in his bowl? I can’t help but feel he’s a little disappointed in me because I don’t bow whenever I see him. When he interviewed me, he wanted to know whether I spoke any Japanese. I explained that I was born in Gardena. He said, Oh, you nisei, as if knowing that one word means he knows something about me. You’ve forgotten your culture, Ms. Mori, even though you’re only second generation. Your issei parents, they hung on to their culture. Don’t you want to learn Japanese? Don’t you want to visit Nippon? For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here? Of course I didn’t ask him those questions. I just smiled and said, You’re so right, sir. She sighed. It’s a job. But I’ll tell you something else. Ever since I got it straight in my head that I haven’t forgotten a damn thing, that I damn well know my culture, which is American, and my language, which is English, I’ve felt like a spy in that man’s office. On the surface, I’m just plain old Ms. Mori, poor little thing who’s lost her roots, but underneath, I’m Sofia and you better not fuck with me.