CHAPTER 22
Of course you cannot sleep. Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake, or so the commandant said. He spoke as I lay on my mattress, a specimen on a slide under a microscope, and with a shutter’s smooth snick, I realized that the doctor’s experiment had succeeded. I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above, beyond the illuminated ceiling, buffeted from my agony through an invisible gyroscopic mechanism. Seen from this altitude, the vivisection being done to me was actually very interesting, leaving my wobbly body’s yolk shimmering beneath my viscous white mind. Thus simultaneously subjugated and elevated, I was beyond the comprehension of even Sonny and the crapulent major, who remained on the plane of my chronic sleeplessness, peering over the shoulders of the doctor, the commandant, and the commissar as they stood around me, no longer in lab coats, scrubs, and stainless steel goggles but in yellow uniforms with red tabs of rank, pistols holstered on their hips. While those below were human and ghost, I was the supernatural Holy Spirit, clairvoyant and clairaudient. In this detached way, I saw the commandant kneel down and reach his hand toward my subhuman self, index finger slowly extending until it pressed lightly on my open eyeball, a touch at which my poor body flinched.
MYSELF
Please, let me sleep.
THE COMMANDANT
You can sleep when I’m satisfied with your confession.
MYSELF
But I’ve done nothing!
THE COMMANDANT
Exactly.
MYSELF
The lights are too bright. If you could—
THE COMMANDANT
The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that — they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception.
MYSELF
I spoke out, didn’t I? Is it my fault no one listened?
THE COMMANDANT
Don’t make excuses! We didn’t whine. We were all willing to be martyrs. It’s only pure luck that the doctor, the commissar, and myself are alive. You simply weren’t willing to sacrifice yourself to save the agent, though she was willing to sacrifice her life to save the commissar’s.
MYSELF
No, I—
THE COMMANDANT
and
THE COMMISSAR
and
THE DOCTOR
(in unison)
Admit it!
I saw myself admit it then. I heard myself acknowledge that I was not being punished or reeducated for the things I had done, but for the thing I had not done. I wept and cried without shame for the shame I felt. I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. I was the man to whom things are done because he had done nothing! And not only did I weep and cry; I howled, a tornado of feeling causing the windows of my soul to shudder and clack. The sight and sound of my abjection was so disturbing that everyone averted his eyes from the sorry mess I had made of myself, except for the commandant, the commissar, and I.
THE COMMISSAR
Satisfied?
THE COMMANDANT
So he’s admitted to doing nothing. But what about the Bru comrade and the Watchman?
THE COMMISSAR
He couldn’t have done anything to save the Bru comrade and the Watchman. As for the agent, she lived.
THE COMMANDANT
She couldn’t even walk when we liberated her.
THE COMMISSAR
Perhaps she was broken in body, but not in spirit.
THE DOCTOR
What happened to those policemen?
THE COMMISSAR
I found them.
THE COMMANDANT
They paid the price. Shouldn’t he?
THE COMMISSAR
Yes, but he should also receive credit for the lives he took.
THE COMMANDANT
Sonny and the major? Their pitiful lives aren’t even equal to the agent’s injuries.
THE COMMISSAR
But is his father’s life equal?
My father? What was this? Even Sonny and the crapulent major, appalled at the harsh evaluation of their lives and deaths, paused in their agitation to listen.
THE COMMANDANT
What did he do to his father?
THE COMMISSAR
Ask him yourself.
THE COMMANDANT
You! Look at me! What did you do to your father?
MYSELF
I didn’t do anything to my father!
THE COMMANDANT
and
THE COMMISSAR
and
THE DOCTOR
(in unison)
Admit it!
And looking down on my weeping, yolked self, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry in sympathy. Did I not remember what I had written to Man about my father? I wish he were dead.
MYSELF
But I didn’t mean it!
THE COMMISSAR
Be honest with yourself.
MYSELF
I didn’t mean for you to do it!
THE COMMISSAR
Of course you did! Who did you think you were writing to?
I was writing to the revolutionary who was on a powerful committee and who knew, even then, that he might one day be a commissar; I was writing to a political cadre already learning the plastic art of making over the souls and minds of men; I was writing to a friend who would do whatever I asked; I was writing to a writer who valued the force of a sentence and the weight of the word; I was writing to a brother who knew what I wanted more than I knew it myself.
THE COMMANDANT
and
THE COMMISSAR
and
THE DOCTOR
(in unison)
What did you do?
MYSELF
I wanted him dead!
The commandant rubbed his chin and looked doubtfully at the doctor, who shrugged. The doctor only cracked open bodies and minds; he was not responsible for what was found.
THE DOCTOR
How did his father die?
THE COMMISSAR
A bullet in the head, listening to his assassin’s confession.
THE COMMANDANT
I wouldn’t put it past you to make up this story to save him.
THE COMMISSAR
Ask my agent. She arranged the father’s death.
The commandant gazed down at me. If I could be guilty of doing nothing, shouldn’t I also be deserving of wanting something? In this case, my father’s death. This father, in the commandant’s atheistic mind, was a colonizer, a dealer in the opiate of the masses, a spokesman for a God for whom millions of dark-skinned people had been sacrificed, supposedly for their own salvation, a burning cross lighting their hard road to Heaven. His death was not murder but a just sentence, which was all that I had ever wanted to write.
THE COMMANDANT
I’ll think about it.
The commandant turned and departed, the doctor obediently following, leaving Sonny and the crapulent major to watch as the commissar slowly settled into the chair with a grimace.
THE COMMISSAR
What a pair we are.
MYSELF
Turn off the lights. I can’t see.
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
Happiness?
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
Love?
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
I don’t know!
THE COMMISSAR
What is more precious than independence and freedom?
MYSELF
I wish I was dead!
There, I had said it, sobbing and howling. Now, at last, I knew what it was that I wanted for myself, what so many people wanted for me. Sonny and the crapulent major applauded in approval, while the commissar drew his pistol. At last! Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt. The sound of the bullet loading into the chamber was as clear as the bell of my father’s church, which my mother and I heard from our hovel every Sunday morning. Looking down on my self, I could still see the child in the man and the man in the child. I was ever always divided, although it was only partially my fault. While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do — no, it was truly impossible, for how could I choose me against myself? Now my friend would release me from this small world with its small-minded people, those mobs who treated a man with two minds and two faces as a freak, who wanted only one answer for any question.