The Sympathizer (24 page)

Then, after the beating, cursing, and application of the water cure, the wet cloth would be unwrapped from Binh’s face to reveal James Yoon, who knew this was his best chance for a supporting actor Oscar. He had been disposed of many times before on-screen as the evanescent Oriental, but none of those deaths possessed this agony, this nobility. Let’s see, he had told me one night at our hotel’s bar, I’ve been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn, hanged by a character actor you don’t know, thrown off a skyscraper by another one, pushed out the window of a Zeppelin, and stuffed in a bag of laundry and dropped in the Hudson River by a gang of Chinese guys. Oh, yes, I was also disemboweled by a squad of Japanese. But those were all quick deaths. All I ever got was a few seconds of screen time at most and sometimes barely that. This time, though—and here he trotted out the giddy smile of a freshly crowned beauty pageant queen—it’s going to take forever to kill me.

So whenever that cloth was unwrapped, and it was unwrapped many a time during the interrogation session, James Yoon gorged on the scenery with the starved fervor of a man who knew he was not going to be upstaged for once by the perennially cute and unbeatable little boy whose mother would not allow him to watch this scene. He grimaced, he groaned, he grunted, he cried, he wept, he bawled, all with real tears hauled up by the buckets from some well deep inside his body. After this, he yelled, he screamed, he shrieked, he wriggled, he twisted, he contorted, he thrashed, and he heaved, the climax being when he vomited, a chunky regurgitated soup of his salty, vinegary breakfast of chorizo and eggs. At the conclusion of this extended first take there was only cathedral silence on the part of the crew, stunned as they regarded what was left of James Yoon, as scarified and beaten as an uppity slave on an American plantation. The Auteur himself came with a wet towel, knelt by the still strapped-down actor, and tenderly wiped the vomit from James Yoon’s face. That was amazing, Jimmy, absolutely amazing.

Thank you, James Yoon gasped.

Now let’s try it one more time, just to be sure.

In fact, six more takes were required before the Auteur declared himself satisfied. At noon, after the third take, the Auteur had asked James Yoon if he wanted to break for lunch, but the actor had shuddered and whispered, No, don’t unstrap me. I’m being tortured, aren’t I? While the rest of the cast and crew retired to the somnolent shade of the canteen, I sat by James Yoon and offered to shelter him with a parasol, but he shook his head with tortoise determination. No, dammit, I’m seeing this through. It’s only an hour in the sun. People like Binh went through worse, didn’t they? Much worse, I agreed. James Yoon’s harrowing experience would at least be finished today, or so he hoped, whereas a real prisoner’s mortification continued for days, weeks, months, years. This was true of those captured by my communist comrades, according to our intelligence reports, but it was also true of those interrogated by my colleagues in the Special Branch. Did the Special Branch interrogations take so long because the policemen were being thorough, unimaginative, or sadistic? All of the above, said Claude. And yet the lack of imagination and the sadism contradict the thoroughness. He was lecturing to a classroom of these secret policemen in the National Interrogation Center, the unblinking eyes of the windows looking out onto the Saigon dockyards. The twenty pupils of his subterranean specialty, including myself, were all veterans of the army or police, but we were still intimidated by his authority, the way he held forth with the pedigree of a professor at the Sorbonne or Harvard or Cambridge. Brute force is not the answer, gentlemen, if the question is how to extract information and cooperation. Brute force will get you bad answers, lies, misdirection, or, worse yet, will get you the answer the prisoner thinks you want to hear. He will say anything to stop the pain. All of this stuff—here Claude waved his hand at the tools of the trade assembled on his desk, much of it made in France, including a billy club, a plastic gasoline container repurposed for soapy water, pliers, a hand-cranked electrical generator for a field telephone—all of it is useless. Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is a science.

Myself and the other secret policemen dutifully wrote this down in our notebooks. Claude was our American adviser, and we expected state-of-the-art knowledge from him and all the other American advisers. We were not disappointed. Interrogation is about the mind first, the body second, he said. You don’t even have to leave a bruise or a mark on the body. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But it’s true. We’ve spent millions to prove it in the lab. The principles are basic, but the application can be creative and tailored to the individual or to the imagination of the interrogator. Disorientation. Sensory deprivation. Self-punishment. These principles have been scientifically demonstrated by the best scientists in the world, American scientists. We have shown that the human mind, subject to the right conditions, will break down faster than the human body. All this stuff—again he waved his hand in contempt at what we now saw as Gallic junk, the tools of old world barbarians rather than new world scientists, of medieval torture rather than modern interrogation—it will take months to wear the subject down with these things. But put a sack on the subject’s head, wrap his hands in balls of gauze, plug his ears, and drop him in a completely dark cell by himself for a week, and you no longer have a human being capable of resistance. You have a puddle of water.

Water. Water, James Yoon said. Can I get some water, please?

I fetched him some water. Despite the water cure, he had not actually had any water except what was absorbed through the wet cloth, which was just wet enough, he said, to be suffocating. As his arms were still bound, I slowly trickled the water down his throat. Thanks, he muttered, just as any prisoner would be grateful to his torturer for the drop of water, or the morsel of food, or the minute of sleep that the torturer doled out. For once I was relieved to hear the Auteur’s voice, calling out, All right, let’s get this done so Jimmy can get back to the pool!

By the final take two hours later, James Yoon really was lachrymose with pain, his face bathed in sweat, mucus, vomit, and tears. It was a sight that I had seen before—the communist agent. But that was real, so real I had to stop thinking about her face. I focused on the fictional state of total degradation that the Auteur wanted for the next scene, which itself required several takes. In this scene, the last one of the movie for James Yoon, the Viet Cong, frustrated because of their inability to break their victim and get him to confess to his crimes, beat his brains out with a spade. Being a bit exhausted from torturing their victim, however, the quartet first decide to take a break smoking Pete Attucks’s Marlboros. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the will of this Binh, who, like many of his southern brethren, whether they be freedom fighters or freedom fighters, was as laid-back as a California surfer regarding every matter except the question of independence from tyranny. Left alone without the towel around his head, he was free to bite off his own tongue and drown under a faucet of his own fake blood, a commercial product that cost thirty-five dollars a gallon and of which approximately two gallons were used to paint James Yoon and decorate the earth. When it came to Binh’s brains, though, Harry had concocted his own homemade cerebro-matter, a secret recipe of oatmeal mixed with agar, the result being a gray, clumpy, congealed mess that he lovingly daubed on the earth around James Yoon’s head. The cinematographer got especially close to capture the look in Binh’s eyes, which I could not see from where I was watching, but which I assumed to be some saintly mix of ecstatic pain and painful ecstasy. Despite all the punishment inscribed on him, he had never uttered a word, or at least an intelligible one.

CHAPTER 11

T
he longer I worked on the Movie, the more I was convinced that I was not only a technical consultant on an artistic project, but an infiltrator into a work of propaganda. A man such as the Auteur would have denied it, seeing his Movie purely as Art, but who was fooling whom? Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

Man, not surprisingly, understood Hollywood’s function as the launcher of the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization. I had written him a worried letter about the relevance of my work on the Movie, and he had written back his most detailed messages ever. First he addressed my concerns about the refugees:
Conditions here exaggerated there. Remember our Party’s principles. Enemies of the Party must be rooted out.
His second message concerned my fear of being a collaborator with the Auteur:
Remember Mao at Yan’an.
That was all, but it disspelled the black crow of doubt sitting on my shoulder. When was the last time an American president found it worth his while to write a speech on the importance of art and literature? I cannot recall. And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them. By urging me to remember Mao, Man was telling me that my mission with this Movie was important. Perhaps the Movie itself was not terribly important, but what it represented, the genus of the American movie, was. An audience member might love or hate this Movie, or dismiss it as only a story, but those emotions were irrelevant. What mattered was that the audience member, having paid for the ticket, was willing to let American ideas and values seep into the vulnerable tissue of his brain and the absorbent soil of his heart.

When Man first discussed such issues with me, in our study group, I was dazed with his brilliance as well as Mao’s. I was a lycée student who had never read Mao, never thought that art and literature had any relationship to politics. Man imparted that lesson by leading myself and the third member of our cell, a bespectacled youth named Ngo, in a spirited discussion of Mao’s lecture. The Great Helmsman’s arguments about art thrilled us. Art could be both popular, aimed for the masses, and yet advanced, raising its own aesthetic standard as well as the taste of the masses. We discussed how this could be done in Ngo’s garden with blustery teenage self-confidence, interrupted every now and again when Ngo’s mother served us a snack. Poor Ngo eventually died in a provincial interrogation center, arrested for possession of antigovernment pamphlets, but back then he was a boy passionately in love with the poetry of Baudelaire. Unlike Man and Ngo, I was never much of an organizer or agitator, which was one reason, Man would say later, that the committees above decided I would be a mole.

He used the English word, which we had learned not so long ago in our English course, taught by a professor whose greatest joy was diagramming sentences. A mole? I said. The animal that digs underground?

The other kind of mole.

There’s another kind?

Of course. To think of a mole as that which digs underground misunderstands the meaning of the mole as a spy. A spy’s task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy’s task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything. Now ask yourself: What can everyone see about you but you yourself cannot?

Enough with the riddles, I said. I give up.

There—he pointed at the middle of my face—in plain sight.

I went to the mirror to see for myself, Man peering over my shoulder. There it indeed was, such a part of myself I had long ago ceased to notice it. Keep in mind that you will be not just any mole, Man said, but the mole that is the beauty spot on the nose of power itself.

Man had the natural ability to make the role of a mole, and other potentially dangerous tasks, seem attractive. Who would not want to be a beauty spot? I kept that in mind when I consulted my English dictionary, where I discovered that a mole could also be a kind of pier or harbor, a unit of measurement in chemistry, an abnormal mass of uterine tissue, and, if pronounced differently, a highly spiced Mexican sauce of peppers and chocolate that I would one day try and very much enjoy. But what caught my eye and has stayed with me ever since was the accompanying illustration, which depicted not a beauty spot but the animal, a subterranean, worm-eating mammal with massive clawed feet, a tubular whiskered snout, and pinhole eyes. It was surely ugly to all except its own mother, and nearly blind.

Crushing victims in its path, the Movie rolled with the momentum of a Panzer division toward the climactic firefight at King Cong’s lair, which would be followed by said lair’s incendiary vaporization by the US Air Force. Several weeks of shooting were required for what amounted to fifteen minutes of screen time popping with helicopters, rocket fire, gun battles, and the utter and magnificent destruction of the elaborate sets that had been raised with every intention of being brought low. Enormous supplies of canned smoke ensured that bewildering mists draped the set every so often, while so many blank rounds were fired, and such significant quantities of detonation cord and explosives used, that all the birds and beasts of the locality vanished in fear and the crew walked around with wicks of cotton in their ears. Of course it was not enough to merely destroy the hamlet and the cave where King Cong hid; to satisfy the Auteur’s need for realistic bloodshed, all the extras also had to be killed off. As the script called for the deaths of several hundred Viet Cong and Laotians, while there were only a hundred extras, most died more than once, many four or five times. The demand for extras was reduced only after the pièce de résistance of the firefight, an awesome napalm strike delivered by a pair of low-flying F-5s flown by the Philippine air force. Most of the enemy thus exterminated, all that was required for the shoot’s last days were twenty extras, a reduced population that left the hamlet a ghost town.