The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
as the crapulent major smiled at me in his driveway—that was Bon—but I was the one responsible for his death.
As for the second man I killed, Sonny, I had known him when we were both foreign students in Southern California in the 1960s, when he was a left-wing activist and I was a communist pretending to be a member of the right wing. Sonny had wisely stayed in California and become a journalist, a perilous occupation in our own country. But our country caught up to him when we refugees came to America, including the General, who suspected Sonny of being a communist agent. Once more the General made me his delivery boy, and if I, his über-competent, super-anticommunist aide, refused, I would have been rightly suspect in his paranoid imagination. I had shot Sonny at close range, and he and the crapulent major had haunted me intermittently ever since, their voices emerging clearly every now and again from the static-ridden channel of my unconscious.
Talents? My laugh sounded weird even to my own ears. What talents?
My aunt looked disconcerted, her sang no longer so froid. You can write, she said. I’m almost done reading your confession, just thirty or forty pages left to go.
I just gave it to you last night.
I’m an editor. I read fast and I don’t sleep much.
What do you think so far?
I think you love your mother. I think you have a problem with women. I think you were treated a bit harshly by Man, who may have had no choice, and yet I think you were too seduced by American culture. You lived a dangerous life as a double agent and a spy, and you were, as you say, a man of two faces and two minds. I wonder what face I am looking at now. And whether you can be trusted.
I could say that you should trust me, but I don’t even trust myself.
Now that is an honest answer. So, you who can sympathize with anyone, what do you think I should do in regards to you? I have welcomed you into my home because you were my revolutionary comrade. But you are not my comrade anymore, are you?
You read about what the revolution did to me!
I read what you said the revolution did to you. But do you not think that perhaps the revolution had reason to be suspicious of you? That you were, or are, in fact too Americanized? Even here in France we are in danger of being Americanized. The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don’t you see that’s how the Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank, but through this infectious disease called the American Dream? You were infected and you barely even realized it! You were an addict, and Man had to cure you. Unfortunately the cure for addiction is always painful.
I was dumbfounded. She had read my confession and this is what she got out of it? So I am wrong, I said, and the revolution was right in punishing me?
From an editorial point of view, I cannot help but admire Man’s methods. My aunt lit a cigarette and smiled. If only I could make all my writers produce this many pages this quickly. You have to respect his rigor, don’t you?
I, who could sympathize with anyone, wanted more than anything for someone to sympathize with me. I had believed that surely my aunt would be gentler than the man for whom I had been spying in America, also the commissar of the camp in which I was later interned, the faceless man, also known as my best friend and blood brother Man, stripped of a great deal of his humanity by an errant napalm strike. Man was very sympathetic to me. He knew me very well, more so than any priest or analyst, but he had used that knowledge to interrogate me and torture me. Unlike Man, my aunt would most likely not torture me. But if she could not understand me, who could?
Maybe, I said, I should get some more of the hashish.
The hemorrhoidal clerk grunted painfully when he saw me at five that afternoon. He struck a match, and the flash of its flame and the hiss of its short, deep breath lit something within me at the moment he lit his cigarette—the fuse of a plot, the long trail of gunpowder in a children’s cartoon that led to the explosive climax.
Could I see the Boss?
Does he want to see you?
Just tell him I have a proposition for him.
The Boss let me wait for an hour, just to show me exactly where I stood, or sat, in his waiting room. At least here, in France, one waited by sitting on a seat versus squatting on one’s well-developed haunches, muscular from a lifelong scarcity of chairs. How many times had I seen my mother squatting on her haunches, her feet flat on the ground, her torso leaning slightly forward to maintain her balance, especially if I was draped on her back? She could squat for hours, forced to stay in a pose that most Westerners could not maintain for more than a minute. She would hum to me, rock me, sing me lullabies, and then, when I was older, tell me fairy tales and recite folk sayings and poems, all while a thin film of sweat glued us together. Every time I waited, I thought of her endless patience, borne not for the sake of whoever was making her wait but for me, who had to wait with her wherever she went. After I grew too heavy for her back, I squatted beside her and the rest of the masses. Then I went to the lycée, and there I became a part of the class that no longer squatted but assumed the right to sit on chairs.
When I was at last called into the office, my buttocks were slightly sore from the hard cup of the plastic chair, ergonomically designed for round Western buttocks rather than flat Eastern ones. I found the Boss sitting on a well-padded chair at a clean desk examining a ledger. Rumor had it that he had never gone to school but was taught on the streets, and anything that he had not learned there, he had taught himself. My heart softened for this poor, abandoned orphan when I imagined what he, with his talent and ambition, could have become with a proper education:
The manager of an investment fund!
The president of a bank!
The captain of an industry!
Or, to consult my Marxist thesaurus:
A vulture of capitalism!
A sucker of blood!
A launderer of profits distilled from the sweat of the people!
I was no longer a communist who believed in a party, but I was still a descendant of Marx who believed in a theory, and that theory offered the best critique of capitalism available. To expect capitalists to critique themselves was like asking the police to police themselves—
What’s the matter? the Boss said. Snap out of it, you crazy bastard.
Sorry, I—or me, or maybe we—muttered.
Do you have the kopi luwak?
He nodded in satisfaction when I placed the package on his desk, and I watched him examine the bean’s anatomy, his letter opener revealing a sliver of the white core. Satisfied, the Boss laid down the blade and said, Anything else?
The hashish . . .
He grinned and leaned back in his chair. Good stuff, right?
So I’ve heard. I haven’t tried it myself.
Good. There are some things you should neither try nor buy.
I saw myself explaining, with the enthusiasm of a sales pitch, the situation with BFD and the Maoist PhD. I gave them a taste of the goods, I heard myself saying. My screw was quite loose at that moment, providing me with enough distance to see myself become what I swore I would never become: a capitalist.
Interesting, the Boss said, the fingers of his hands touching in a steeple. Not that it’s a surprise. Not at all. Even those people would enjoy the things I can give them.
They’re only human. So very human.
Exactly! He was greatly amused, if the smile on his face was any indication. Even the French are only human. The rich, too. Especially the rich.
I’m not sure that they’re rich. They’re intellectuals.
If they don’t work with their hands, they’re rich. And that politician is definitely rich. I know his