You’re going to kill me if you won’t let me sleep, I said.
I am going to keep you awake until you understand, the voice said.
I understand nothing!
Then you have understood almost everything, the voice said. He chuckled and it sounded almost like my old schoolmate. Isn’t it funny how we find ourselves here, my friend? You came to save Bon’s life and I came to save both your lives. Let us hope my plot works out better than yours. But truth be told, it wasn’t purely out of friendship that I petitioned to be the commissar here. You have seen my face, or rather, my lack of one. Can you imagine my wife and children seeing this? The voice cracked. Can you imagine their horror? Can you imagine mine every time I look in the mirror? Although, to be honest, I have not looked at a mirror for years now.
I wept, thinking of him exiled from them. His wife was a revolutionary, too, a girl from our sister school of such integrity and simple beauty that I would have fallen in love with her if he hadn’t first. His boy and girl must be now at least seven and eight, little angels whose only fault was that they sometimes fought with each other. They would never look with fear on your. . your condition, I said. You only imagine what they see through how you see yourself.
You know nothing! he shouted. Silence ensued again, interrupted only by the rasp of his breathing. I could imagine the scars of his lips, the scars in his throat, but all I wanted was to sleep. . His foot nudged me. I apologize for losing my temper, the voice said, softly. My friend, you cannot know what I feel. You only think you can. But can you know what it is like to be so horrible that your own children cry when they see you, when your wife flinches at your touch, when your own friend does not recognize you? Bon has seen me this last year and not known who I am. True, he sits at the back of the meeting hall and only sees me from afar. I have not called him in to let him know who I am, because such knowledge would certainly do him no good and probably do him great harm. Nevertheless — nevertheless I dream that he will recognize me despite myself, even if, in recognizing me, he would only want to kill me. Can you imagine the pain of losing my friendship with him? Perhaps you can. But can you actually know the pain of napalm burning the skin off your face and your body? How can you?
Then tell me, I cried. I want to know what happened to you!
Silence ensued, for how long I do not know, until the foot nudged me again and I realized I had missed the first part of his story. I was still wearing my uniform, said the voice. The sense of doom was thick among my unit, panic in the eyes of the officers and the men. With the liberation only hours away, I hid my joy and excitement but not my worry for my family, even though they should be safe. My wife was at home with the children, one of our couriers close by to ensure their safety. When the tanks of the liberation army approached our bridge and my commanding officer ordered us to stand firm, I worried for myself as well. I didn’t want our liberators to shoot me on the last day of the war, and my mind was calculating how to avoid such a fate when someone said, Here’s the air force at last. One of our planes was overhead, flying high to avoid antiaircraft fire, but also flying far too high for a bombing run. Get closer, someone shouted. How’s he going to hit anything flying that high? The voice chuckled. How indeed? When the pilot dropped his bombs, the sense of dread possessing my fellow officers touched me, for I could see that the bombs, instead of falling toward the tanks, were falling toward us, in slow motion. The bombs fell faster than our eyesight told us, and though we ran, we did not get far. A cloud of napalm engulfed us, and I suppose I was lucky. I ran faster than the others and the napalm only licked me. It hurt. Oh, how much it hurt! But what can I tell you besides the fact that being on fire feels like being on fire? What can I tell you about the pain except that it was the most horrendous pain I have ever felt? The only way for me to show you how much it hurt, my friend, is for me to burn you myself, and that I will never do.
I, too, had come close to death on the tarmac of the Saigon airport, and again on the set of the Movie, but neither experience was the same as being burned. At worst I had been lightly scorched. I tried to imagine that multiplied by ten thousand, by a napalm that was the very light of Western civilization, having been invented at Harvard, or so I had learned in Claude’s class. But I could not. All I could feel was my desire for sleep as my self dissolved, leaving only my melting mind. But even in this buttery condition, my mind understood that this was not the time to talk about me. I can’t imagine, I said. Not at all.
It was a miracle that I lived. I am a living miracle! A human being turned inside out. I should be dead but for my dear wife, who searched for me when I did not come home. She found me dying in an army hospital, a low-priority case. When she notified the powers that be, they ordered the best surgeons remaining in Saigon to operate on me. I was saved! But for what? The pain of being burned was hardly less than the pain of having no skin and no face. I was on fire every day for months. When my medication wears off, I still burn. Excruciating is the right word, but it cannot convey the feeling it describes.
I think I know what excruciation feels like.
You are only beginning to know.
You don’t have to do this!
Then you do not yet understand. Certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciation. I want you to know what it is that I knew and still know. I would have spared you that knowledge if you had not come back. But you have come back, and the commandant is watching. Left by yourself, you would not survive under his care. You frighten him. You are nothing but a shadow standing at the mouth of his cave, some strange creature that sees things from two sides. People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity. My task is to prove that you do not need to be purged, that you can be released. I have constructed this examination room exactly for this purpose.
You don’t have to do this, I muttered.
But I do! What’s being done to you is for your own good. The commandant would break you the only way he knows how, through your body. The only way to save you was to promise the commandant that I would test new methods of examination that would not leave a mark. This is why we have not beat you even once.
I should be thankful?
Yes, you should. But now it is time for the final revision. The commandant will accept no less. You must give him more than what you have.
I have nothing left to confess!
There is always something. That is confession’s nature. We can never stop confessing because we are imperfect. Even the commandant and I must criticize ourselves to each other, as the Party has intended. The military commandant and the political commissar are the living embodiment of dialectical materialism. We are the thesis and the antithesis from which comes the more powerful synthesis, the truly revolutionary consciousness.
If you already know what I forgot to confess, then tell me!
The voice chuckled again. I heard the shuffling of papers. Let me quote from your manuscript, the voice said. “The communist agent with the papier-mâché evidence of her espionage crammed into her mouth, our sour names literally on the tip of her tongue.” You mention her four more times in your confession. We learn that you pulled this list from her mouth and that she looked at you with mortal hatred, but we don’t learn her fate. You must tell us what you did to her. We demand to know!
I saw her face again, her dark peasant skin and broad, flat nose, so similar to those broad, flat noses of the doctors surrounding her in the movie theater. But, I said, I did nothing to her.