“What about the homeless?” another reporter asked quickly, eager to drop that subject.
“The government of the Socialist Republic has created homelessness, not combated it. Its housing policies have fallen greatly short of meeting the needs of its urban populations. Its solution has been to try to herd unhoused masses into khu nha moi, New Economic Zones, which are no more than the old New Life Hamlets that were such a shame of the former South Vietnamese regime. You would call them concentration camps. And to create these New Economic Zones, the Socialist Republic has forcibly displaced minority populations such as the Hmong, the Nung, the Muong, and the Khmer. Such displacement, by the way, has been defined as genocide by the United Nations.
“Understand, also, that as in the USSR, in the Socialist Republic indigence is a crime. People you would see living on the streets in the West are here arrested and shipped to trai cai tao, reeducation camps. As with the environment, Free Vietnam cannot offer magical solutions. We can promise to be less brutal and ineffectual than the current regime.”
The journalists shifted and rumbled. Moonchild felt stirrings of contempt for them, and put the feelings down with shocked surprise and self-reproach. But while the facts she had recounted were news to her and Mark, these people had to have seen their truth before, have known them. But they chose to act as if they were untrue, and to present that pretense to the public as fact.
She was beginning to understand Belew’s virulent contempt for the media. It made her uncomfortable, as agreeing with the ultraconservative spook always did.
She moistened her lips, which felt not just dry but strange, as if they were developing cold sores. She hated the lights.
“Are there any more questions?”
“Why do they want me for their spokesperson?” Moonchild asked, picking her way down the steep slope. She saw better at night, by moon or starlight, than she did in artificial illumination. But the mountainside was brushy, the footing unreliable.
“Let me count the ways,” Belew said. He was actually moving with more confidence than she. It did not occur to her that for all her intrinsically superior physical abilities, he was the one with experience of the land. She just took the fact as a reproach. “You’re an ace. You’re beautiful. You’re charismatic. You’re photogenic. And you’re not Vietnamese. The Viets are adept at not taking the rap for their mistakes — look at what they did to us Americans. If the rebellion pulls a rock, they can point their finger at a foreigner and say, ’It’s all her fault.’”
“Oh.” She misstepped, slipped, caught herself on her hands as gravel slid rattling away from beneath her feet. “I am sorry. I am so clumsy.”
“A gentleman never disagrees with a lady,” Belew said, extending a helping hand, which she declined. “Fortunately I know when not to be a gentleman. Nonsense, dear child. You are far more coordinated than any nat or most aces. You’re simply upset and fighting yourself.”
She stood upright again, came close to him. “If you know so much, tell me what I am!” she whispered fiercely.
“You’re what would be called, in the current vernacular, a babe.”
She clenched her fists. “No! You know what I mean. Why could I not speak Korean when Kim addressed me?”
“Maybe because you’re not Korean.”
She felt her knees lose all cohesion, as if the collagens binding her sinews had dissolved. Even the stars, stabbing down hard as needles through clear thin mountain air, could not heal her with their ancient light. She felt a stab of Mark’s remnant dread of them.
“What am I?” she whispered. The escort of jokers and Khmers Rouges slipped and slid past them down the trail, eager to put as much mountain up-and-down between themselves and the press-conference site as they quickly could.
“What am I?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks.
“I don’t know, darlin’. What do you think you are? How do you account for being trapped inside the six-four male body of the world’s Last Hippie?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something must have happened. To me and the others. We were … lost. Somehow we found — shelter — in Mark’s psyche.”
“Did you lose your grasp of Korean along with your separate existence?”
“What are you trying to do to me?” she sobbed.
“Trying to lead you to the truth,” he said with quiet intensity. “I don’t know what it is. But if you just wander, and wonder, and don’t try to confront the facts of who and what you are — whatever they are — you’re never going to hold up. You’ll lose your center. And with it the resistance will lose its own.”
She covered her face with her hands. “You think Mark has — what do you say? — a split personality.”
“‘Multiple-personality disorder’ is the current catchphrase, unless they changed it again while I wasn’t looking.”
She grabbed his biceps. “I’m a fantasy, then? I don’t exist?”
“Mu,” he said evenly. “Zen negation. That question was never asked, the way the rōshi Jōshū unasked the question of whether a dog has Buddha nature. Was it a fantasy that shattered Colonel Nguyen’s .45-caliber manhood into a zillion pieces? Is it a fantasy that’s about to pinch my arms in half?”
“Oh,” she said. She let go and stepped back. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’s time you quit hiding behind apologies. Where’s Mark, right this instant?”
She placed a hand between her breasts. “Inside.”
“All right. When you’re not here, where are you?”
“Inside … Mark.”
“That’s right. So, is Mark unreal?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“But, Mark is the real one. He becomes us”
“Bullshit.”
She shut her mouth.
“Mark is the baseline personality, as he calls himself What’s the difference? You don’t lose your consciousness when you’re inside him, now, do you? I know he hears the voices of all of you. Once in a while he even speaks in them.”
She hung her head, felt the tears drip from her eyes. “That’s true.”
“So you never don’t exist. It’s just that sometimes you have no physical reality. Visible, anyway — I sure as heck am not pretending to understand the mechanics of your coming and going.
“Look, child. You are real, you are here. How can it matter where you really came from, or what you’re doing here? You’re a fact. And if you let brooding about an unanswerable question like who you really are — and who on Earth can ever wholly answer that question, anyway? — if you let that dissolve you, you are going to leave a whole lot of people who depend on you sinking without a life preserver.”
She began to tremble. He put his arm around her. She stiffened, then stopped fighting the contact and melted against him.
“Isis. Isis, do you feel me?”
She went rigid. Belew held her, firm but not constricting. His left hand was a bandaged stump again; he’d been up to tricks, which was why the government-owned mine site was available for the rebels to hold a press conference in.
“Isis, where are you?”
Eric?
“Accept no substitutes.”
Eric, what’s happening to me?
“An attack of conscience, maybe?”