CHAPTER 15
A great deal of what I have confessed so far may seem foreign to you, dear Commandant, and to this mysterious, faceless commissar of yours whom I have heard so much about. The American Dream, the culture of Hollywood, the practices of American democracy, and so on can altogether make America a disorienting place for those like us who hail from the Orient. Presumably my half-Occidental status has helped me, perhaps innately, in understanding the American character, culture, and customs, including those concerning romance. The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.
Lana was clearly a woman in need of courting. I wrote her letters in which I pleaded my case, using the perfect cursive taught to me by pterodactyl nuns; I composed villanelles, sonnets, and couplets of doubtful prosody but resolute sincerity; I seized her guitar when she let me sit on a Moroccan cushion in her living room and sang her songs by Pham Duy, Trinh Cong Son, and the newest lyrical darling of our diaspora, Duc Huy. She rewarded me with the enigmatic smiles of an alluring apsara, a reserved seat at the front row of her performances, and the favor of continuing audiences, of which I was given no more than one a week. I was both grateful and tormented, as I recounted to Bon on listless afternoons at the liquor store. His response was as unenthusiastic as you might anticipate. Tell me this, lover boy, he said one day, back to his terse self. His attention was divided between me and a pair of teenage patrons creeping, possum-like, toward an aisle, a duo whose years and IQ were measurable in the low double digits. What happens when the General finds out? I was sitting with him behind the counter, awaiting the General’s afternoon arrival. Why would the General ever find out? I said. Nobody would tell him. Lana and I aren’t sentimental enough to think that one day we’ll get married and confess to him. Then what’s all this wooing and daring despair? he asked, quoting from my narration of our courtship. I said: Must wooing and daring despair end in marriage? Can’t it end in love? What does marriage have to do with love? He snorted. God made us to be married. Love has everything to do with marriage. I wondered if he was about to dissolve as he had that night at Fantasia, but discussing love, marriage, and death had no visible effect on him this afternoon, perhaps because he was focused on the convex mirror suspended over the rear corner. The mirror’s monocular eye revealed the teenagers gazing on the chilled beer with reverence, entranced by the reflection of fluorescent light on amber glass. Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human — if God exists — He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.
You know what makes us human? In the mirror, the shorter of the duo slipped a bottle into his pocket. With a weary sigh, Bon reached for the baseball bat beneath the cash register. What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.
Perhaps the point could have been made more delicately, but he was never one to be interested in delicacy. He was more interested in threatening the shoplifters with severe bodily harm until they fell to their knees, surrendered the items hidden in their jackets, and kowtowed for forgiveness. Bon was merely teaching them the way we had been taught. Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. My father was no exception. He was simply more high-minded than most, working the xylophone of his students’ knuckles with his ruler until our poor joints were bruised purple, blue, and black. Sometimes we deserved to be whacked, sometimes not, but my father never showed any regret when evidence of our innocence surfaced. Since all were guilty of Original Sin, even punishment wrongly given was in some way just.
My mother was guilty, too, but hers was such an unoriginal sin. I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality. Even in courting Lana, I suspected any sin I committed with her would never be enough because it would not be original. Yet I believed that sinning with her might be enough, since I would never know unless I tried. Perhaps I would glimpse infinity when I lit her up with the spasmodic spark that came from striking my soul against hers. Perhaps I would finally know eternity without resorting to this:
Q. Say the Apostles’ Creed.
A. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth. .
Even these two thieves had likely heard of this prayer, Christian ideas being so important to the American people that they had granted them a place on the most precious document of all, the dollar bill. IN GOD WE TRUST must even now be printed on the money in their wallets. Bon tapped the shoplifters’ foreheads gently with the baseball bat as they cried, Please, forgive us! At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The question the baseball bat would not resolve was whether they knew the other motive, love, which, for some reason, was much harder to teach.
The General arrived at his usual time, and as soon as he did, we left, myself chauffeuring while he sat in the back. He was not verbose as usual, nor did he spend his time poring through papers in his briefcase. Instead, he gazed out the window, which he normally considered a waste of time, and the only command he issued was to turn off the music. In the ensuing silence I heard the muted cello of foreboding, announcing the theme I was sure preoccupied him: Sonny. The newspaper article Sonny had written on the alleged operations of the Fraternity and the Movement had circulated with the ease of the common cold through the exiled community, his microbial allegations becoming confirmed facts and his facts becoming infectious rumors. By the time the rumors reached me, the story was that the General was either broke in his efforts to fund the Movement or wallowing in ill-gotten lucre. This was either the payoff from the US government for keeping mum about its failure to help us at war’s end, or the profits from not just a chain of restaurants, but also drug dealing, prostitution, and extortion of small-time business owners. The Movement, some insisted, was simply a racket, and its men in Thailand a rabble of scurvy degenerates dependent on the community’s donations. Others said those men were actually a regiment of the finest Rangers, bloodthirsty and mad for revenge. According to this ever-proliferating gossip, the General was either going to send these fools to their deaths from his armchair or he was going to return, like MacArthur to the Philippines, to lead the heroic invasion himself. If I was hearing this gossip, then Madame certainly was, and therefore the General, too, all of us tuned in to the humming, crackling AM channel of hearsay. This included the crapulent major, his fat body spilling over the edges of the bucket seat next to me. I dared not turn my head to look, although from the corner of my eye I saw him facing me, all three of his eyes surely wide open. I had not drilled that hole into his head that had given him his third eye, but I had come up with the plot that led to his fate. Now it was this third eye that allowed him to continue watching me even though he was dead, a spectator and not just a specter. I can’t wait to see the end of this little story, he said. But I already know how it’s going to end. Don’t you?