you. You were upset. Your learning curve was so steep that I made a mistake: I
tried to teach you things you weren’t ready for. And I let you go. You must have
thought I deserved what I got from you.”
“And what was that?”
“Betrayal.” Demarest’s eyes narrowed. “You thought you could destroy me. But
they needed me. They always need men like me. Just like they’ve always needed
men like you. I did what I had to do—what had to be done. I always did what had
to be done. Sometimes people like me are seen as an embarrassment, and then
actions are taken. I became an embarrassment to you. I embarrassed you because
you looked at me and saw yourself. So much of you was me. How could it be
otherwise? I taught you everything you knew. I gave you the skills that saved
your life a dozen times over. What made you think you had the right to judge
me?” At last, a diamond-hard flash of anger pierced his eerie calm.
“You forfeited any rights you had by your own actions,” Janson said. “I saw what
you did. I saw who you were. A monster.”
“Oh please. I showed you what you were, and you didn’t like what you saw.”
“No.”
“We were the same, you and I, and that’s what you couldn’t accept.”
“We weren’t the same.”
“Oh, we were. In many ways, we still are. Don’t think I didn’t keep tabs on what
you got up to in later years. They called you ‘the machine.’ You know what that
was short for, of course: ‘the killing machine.’ Because that’s what you were.
Oh yes. And you presumed to judge me? Oh, Paul, don’t you know why you took it
on yourself to destroy me? Are you that devoid of self-insight? How comforting
it must be to tell yourself that I’m the monster and you’re the saint. You’re
afraid of what I showed you.”
“Yes—a profoundly disturbed individual.”
“Don’t delude yourself, Paul. I’m talking about what I showed you about
yourself. Whatever I was, you were.”
“No!” Janson flushed with rage and horror. Violence was indeed something he
excelled at: he could no longer run from that truth. But for him it was never an
end in itself: rather, violence was a last resort to minimize further violence.
“As I used to tell you, we know more than we know. Have you forgotten what you
yourself did in Vietnam? Have you magically repressed the memories?”
“You don’t fool me with your goddamn mind games,” Janson growled.
“I read the depositions you filed about me,” Demarest continued airily. “Somehow
they neglected to mention what you’d got up to.”
“So you’re the one who’s been spreading that bilge about me—those twisted
stories.”
Demarest’s gaze was steady. “Your victims are still out there, some of them
still crippled but still alive. Send an agent out there to interview them. They
remember you. They remember with horror.”
“It’s a lie! It’s a goddamn lie!”
“Are you sure?” Demarest’s question was an electric probe. “No, you’re not sure.
You’re not sure at all.” A beat. “It’s as if part of you never left, because
you’re haunted by memories, aren’t you? Recurrent nightmares, right?”
Janson nodded; he could not stop himself.
“All these decades later and your sleep is still troubled. Yet what makes those
memories so adhesive?”
“What do you care?”
“Could it be guilt? Reach down, Paul—reach down inside you and bring it up,
bring it back to the surface.”
“Shut up, you bastard.”
“What do your memories leave out, Paul?”
“Stop it!” Janson yelled, and yet there was a tremor in his voice. “I’m not
going to listen to this.”
Demarest repeated the question more quietly. “What do your memories leave out?”
The images came to him now in frozen moments of time, not with the fluidity of
remembered movement but one frame after another. They had a ghostly surreality
that was superimposed over what he saw in front of his face.
Humping another mile. And another. And another. Knifing through the jungle,
taking care to avoid the hamlets and villages where VC sympathizers might make
all his struggles for naught.
And forcing himself through an especially dense intertwining of vines and trees
one morning, where he happened upon a vast oval of burn.
The smells told him what had happened—not so much the mingled smells of fish
sauce, cooking fires, the fertilizing excrement of humans and water buffalo and
chickens as something that overpowered even those smells: the tangy
petrochemical odor of napalm.
The air was heavy with it. And everywhere was ash, and soot, and the lumpy
remains of a fast-burning chemical fire. He trudged through the burned-out oval
and his feet became black with charcoal. It was as if God had held a giant
magnifying glass over this spot and burned it with the sun’s own rays. And when
he adjusted to the napalm fumes, another smell caught his nostrils, that of
charred human flesh. When it cooled it would be food for birds and vermin and
insects. It had not yet cooled.
From the caved-in, blackened wrecks he could see that there had once been twelve
thatch-covered houses in a clearing here. And just outside the hamlet,
miraculously untouched by the flames, was a cooking shack framed with coconut
leaves, and a meal that had been freshly prepared, no more than thirty minutes
earlier. A heap of rice. A stew of prawns and glass noodles. Bananas that had
been sliced, fried, and curried. A bowl of peeled litchi and durian fruit. Not
an ordinary meal. After a few moments, he recognized what this was.
A wedding feast.
A few yards away, the bodies of the newlyweds lay smoldering, along with their
families. Yet, by some fluke, the peasant banquet had been saved from
destruction. Now he put aside his AK-47 and ate greedily, shoveling rice and
prawns into his mouth with his hands, drinking from a warm cauldron of water
that had once awaited another sack of rice. He ate and was sick and ate more,
and then he rested, lying heavily on the ground. How odd that was—so little
remained of him, and yet it could seem so heavy!
When some of his strength had been replenished, he pushed on through uninhabited
jungle, pushed on, pushed on. One foot in front of the other.
That was what would save him: movement without thought, action without
reflection.
And when he had his next conscious thought, it, too, came with the wind. The
sea!
He could smell the sea!
Over the next ridgeline was the coast. And thus freedom. For U.S. Navy gunboats
patrolled this very segment of the shoreline, patrolled it closely: he knew
this. And along the coast, somewhere not far from his latitude, a small U.S.
navy base had been established: he knew this, too. When he made his way to the
shore, he would be free, welcomed by his Navy brethren, taken away, taken home,
taking to a place of healing.
Free!
I think so, Phan Nguyen, I think so.
Was he hallucinating? It had been a long time, too long a time, since he had
been able to find any water to drink. His vision was often odd and unstable, a
common symptom of niacin deficiency. His malnutrition surely had brought other
cognitive impairments as well. But he inhaled deeply, filled his lungs with the
air, and he knew that there was salt in it, the scent of seaweed and sun; he
knew it. Liberation lay just over the ridgeline.
We will never meet again, Phan Nguyen.
He trudged up a gentle slope, the ground thinning out now, the vegetation
growing less dense, and then he startled.
A darting figure, not far from him. An animal? An assailant? His vision was
failing him. His senses: they all were failing him, and at a time when they must
not. So close—he was so close.
His gaunt fingers fell, spiderlike, to the trigger enclosure of the submachine
gun. To be undone by his enemies when he was so near home—that would be a hell
beyond imagining, beyond any he had endured.
Another darting movement. He squeezed off a triple burst of gunfire. Three
bullets. The noise and the bucking of the weapon in his arms felt greater than
they ever had. He rushed over to see what had been hit.
Nothing. He could see nothing. He leaned against a gnarled mangosteen tree and
craned around, and there was nothing. Then he looked down, and he realized what
he had done.
A shirtless boy. Simple brown pants, and tiny sandals on his feet. In his hand
was a bottle of Coca-Cola, its foamy contents now seeping to the ground.
He was, perhaps, seven years old. His crime was—what? Playing hide-and-seek?
Gamboling with a butterfly?
The boy lay on the ground. A beautiful child, the most beautiful child Janson
had ever seen. He appeared oddly peaceful, except for the jagged crimson across