"You see," he went on, "when I appeared in the village, when I walked around and" he chuckled "haunted the place, those times were like sleepwalking. I barely knew what was happening. But the rest of the time, I was somewhere else. Somewhere really f.u.c.king weird."
My weakness was bordering on vertigo, but I mustered my strength and croaked, "Where?"
"The Land of Shades," he said. "That"s what I call it, anyway. You wouldn"t like it, Puleo. It wouldn"t fit your idea of order."
The lights burned in his eyes, winking bright, and as if in correspondence to their brightness my dizziness increased. "Tell me about it," I said, trying to take my mind off the discomfort.
"I"d be delighted!" He grinned nastily. "But not now. It"s too complicated. Tonight, man. I"ll send you a dream tonight. A bad dream. That"ll satisfy your curiosity."
My head was spinning, my stomach abubble with nausea. "Lemme go, Stoner," I said.
"Isn"t this good for you, man? It"s very good for me." With a flick of his hand, he released my wrist.
I braced myself to keep from falling over, drew a deep breath, and gradually my strength returned. Stoner"s eyes continued to burn, and his features maintained their coa.r.s.ened appearance. The difference between the way he looked now and the lost soul I had first seen was like that between night and day, and I began to wonder whether or not his touching me and my resultant weakness had anything to do with the transformation. "Part of your process," I said. "Does that..."
He looked me straight in the eyes, and I had the impression he was cautioning me to silence. It was more than a caution: a wordless command, a sending. "Let me explain something," he said. "A ghost is merely a stage of growth. He walks because he grows strong by walking. The more he walks, the less he"s bound to the world. When he"s strong enough" he made a planing gesture with his hand "he goes away."
He seemed to be expecting a response. "Where"s he go?" I asked.
"Where he belongs," he said. "And if he"s prevented from walking, from growing strong, he"s doomed."
"You mean he"ll die?"
"Or worse."
"And there"s no other way out for him?"
"No."
He was lying I was sure of it. Somehow I posed for him a way out of Cam Le. "Well...so," I said, fl.u.s.tered, uncertain of what to do and at the same time pleased with the prospect of conspiring against Tuu. "Just sit with me awhile," he said, easing his left foot forward to touch my right ankle.
Once again I experienced weakness, and over the next seven or eight hours, he would alternately move his foot away, allowing me to recover, and then bring it back into contact with me. I"m not certain what was happening. One logic dictates that since I had been peripherally involved in his death "part of his process" he was therefore able to draw strength from me. Likely as not, this was the case. Yet I"ve never been convinced that ordinary logic applied to our circ.u.mstance: it may be that we were governed by an arcane rationality to which we both were blind. Though his outward aspect did not appear to undergo further changes, his strength became tangible, a cold radiation that pulsed with the steadiness of an icy heart. I came to feel that the image I was seeing was the tip of an iceberg, the perceptible extremity of a huge power cell that existed mainly in dimensions beyond the range of mortal vision. I tried to give the impression of an interview to our observers by continuing to ask questions; but Stoner sat with his head down, his face hidden, and gave terse, disinterested replies.
The sun declined to the tops of the palms, the yellow paint of the houses took on a tawny hue, and drained by the day-long alternation of weakness and recovery I told Stoner I needed to rest. "Tomorrow," he said without looking up. "Come back tomorrow."
"All right." I had no doubt that Tuu would be eager to go on with the experiment. I stood and turned to leave; but then another question, a pertinent one, occurred to me. "If a ghost is a stage of growth," I said, "what"s he grow into?"
He lifted his head, and I staggered back, terrified. His eyes were ablaze, even the whites winking with cold fire, as if nuggets of phosphorus were embedded in his skull.
"Tomorrow," he said again.
During the debriefing that followed, I developed a bad case of the shakes and experienced a number of other, equally unpleasant, reactions; the places where Stoner had touched me seemed to have retained a chill, and the thought of that dead hand leeching me of energy was in retrospect thoroughly repellent. A good many of Tuu"s subordinates, alarmed by Stoner"s transformation, lobbied to break off the experiment. I did my best to soothe them, but I wasn"t at all sure I wanted to return to the village. I couldn"t tell whether Tuu noticed either my trepidation or the fact that I was being less than candid; he was too busy bringing his subordinates in line to question me in depth.
That night, when Fierman broke out his whiskey, I swilled it down as if it were an antidote to poison. To put it bluntly, I got s.h.i.t-faced. Both Fierman and Witcover seemed warm human beings, old buddies, and our filthy yellow room with its flickering lamp took on the coziness of a cottage and hearth. The first stage of my drunk was maudlin, filled with self-recriminations over my past treatment of Stoner: I vowed not to shrink from helping him. The second stage...Well, once I caught Fierman gazing at me askance and registered that my behavior was verging on the manic. Laughing hysterically, talking like a speed freak. We talked about everything except Stoner, and I suppose it was inevitable that the conversation work itself around to the war and its aftermath. Dimly, I heard myself pontificating on a variety of related subjects. At one point Fierman asked what I thought of the Vietnam Memorial, and I told him I had mixed emotions.
"Why?" he asked.
"I go to the Memorial, man," I said, standing up from the table where we had all been sitting. "And I cry. You can"t help but cryin", "cause that" I hunted for an appropriate image "that black dividin" line between nowheres, that says it just right "bout the war. It feels good to cry, to go public with grief and take your place with all the vets of the truly outstandin" wars." I swayed, righted myself. "But the Memorial, the Unknown, the parades...basically they"re bulls.h.i.t." I started to wander around the room, realized that I had forgotten why I had stood and leaned against the wall.
"How you mean?" asked Witcover, who was nearly as drunk as I was.
"Man," I said, "it"s a shuck! I mean ten G.o.dd.a.m.n years go by, and alla sudden there"s this blast of media warmth and government-sponsored emotion. "Welcome home, guys," ever"body"s sayin". "We"re sorry we treated you so bad. Next time it"s gonna be different. You wait and see."" I went back to the table and braced myself on it with both hands, staring blearily at Witcover: his tan looked blotchy. "Hear that, man? "Next time." That"s all it is. n.o.body really gives a s.h.i.t "bout the vets. They"re just pavin" the way for the next time."
"I don"t know," said Witcover. "Seems to"
"Right!" I spanked the table with the flat of my hand. "You don"t know. You don"t know s.h.i.t "bout it, so shut the f.u.c.k up!"
"Be cool," advised Fierman. "Man"s ent.i.tled to his "pinion."
I looked at him, saw a flushed, fat face with bloodshot eyes and a stupid reproving frown. "f.u.c.k you," I said. "And f.u.c.k his "pinion." I turned back to Witcover. "Whaddya think, man? That there"s this genuine breath of conscience sweepin" the land? Open your G.o.dd.a.m.n eyes! You been to the movies lately? Jesus Christ! Courageous grunts strikin" fear into the heart of the Red Menace! Miraculous one-man missions to save our honor. Huh! Honor!" I took a long pull from the bottle. "Those movies, they make war seem like a mystical opportunity. Well, man, when I was here it wasn"t quite that way, y"know. It was leeches, fungus, the s.h.i.ts. It was searchin" in the weeds for your buddy"s arm. It was lookin" into the snaky eyes of some wh.o.r.e you were bangin" and feelin" weird s.h.i.t crawl along your spine and expectin" her head to do a Linda Blair three-sixty spin." I slumped into a chair and leaned close to Witcover. "It was Mordor, man. Stephen King-land. Horror. And now, now I look around at all these movies and monuments and c.r.a.p, and it makes me wanna f.u.c.kin" puke to see what a n.o.ble h.e.l.l it"s turnin" out to be!"
I felt pleased with myself, having said this, and I leaned back, basking in a righteous glow. But Witcover was unimpressed. His face cinched into a scowl, and he said in a tight voice, "You"re startin" to really p.i.s.s me off, y"know."
"Yeah?" I said, and grinned. "How "bout that?"
"Yeah, all you war-torn creeps, you think you got papers sayin" you can make an a.s.s outta yourself and everybody else gotta say, "Oh, you poor f.u.c.ker! Give us more of your tortured wisdom!" "
Fierman m.u.f.fled a laugh, and rankled I said, "That so?"
Witcover hunched his shoulders as if preparing for an off-tackle plunge. "I been listenin" to you guys for years, and you"re alla G.o.dd.a.m.n same. You think you"re owed something "cause you got ground around in the political mill. s.h.i.t! I been in Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. Compared to those people, you didn"t go through diddley. But you use what happened as an excuse for f.u.c.kin" up your lives...or for being a.s.sholes. Like you, man." He affected a macho-sounding ba.s.s voice. ""I been in a war. I am an expert on reality." You don"t know how ridiculous you are."
"Am I?" I was shaking again, but with adrenaline not fear, and I knew I was going to hit Witcover. He didn"t know it he was smirking, his eyes flicking toward Fierman, seeking approval and that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives. But the real reason, the one that had begun to rumble inside me, was Stoner. All my fear, all my reactions thus far, had merely been tremors signaling an imminent explosion, and now, thinking about him nearby, old horrors were stirred up, and I saw myself walking in a napalmed ville rife with dead VC, crispy critters, and beside me this weird little guy named Fellowes who claimed he could read the future from their scorched remains and would point at a hexagram-like structure of charred bone and gristle and say, "That there means a bad moon on Wednesday," and claimed, too, that he could read the past from the blood of head wounds, and then I was leaning over this Canadian nurse, beautiful blonde girl, disemboweled by a mine and somehow still alive, her organs dark and wet and pulsing, and somebody giggling, whispering about what he"d like to do, and then another scene that was whirled away so quickly, I could only make out the color of blood, and Witcover said something else, and a dead man was stretching out his hand to me and...
I nailed Witcover, and he flew sideways off the chair and rolled on the floor. I got to my feet, and Fierman grabbed me, trying to wrestle me away; but that was unnecessary, because all my craziness had been dissipated. "I"m okay now," I said, slurring the words, pushing him aside. He threw a looping punch that glanced off my neck, not even staggering me. Then Witcover yelled. He had pulled himself erect and was weaving toward me; an egg-shaped lump was swelling on his cheekbone. I laughed he looked so puffed up with rage and started for the door. As I went through it, he hit me on the back of the head. The blow stunned me a bit, but I was more amused than hurt; his fist had made a funny bonk sound on my skull, and that set me to laughing harder.
I stumbled between the houses, bouncing off walls, reeling out of control, and heard shouts...Vietnamese shouts. By the time I had regained my balance, I had reached the center of the village. The moon was almost full, pale yellow, its craters showing: a pitted eye in the black air. It kept shrinking and expanding, and as it seemed to lurch farther off I realized I had fallen and was lying flat on my back. More shouts. They sounded distant, a world away, and the moon had begun to spiral, to dwindle, like water being sucked down a drain. Jesus, I remember thinking just before I pa.s.sed out, Jesus, how"d I get so drunk?
I"d forgotten Stoner"s promise to tell me about the Land of Shades, but apparently he had not, for that night I had a dream in which I was Stoner. It was not that I thought I was him: I was him, p.r.o.ne to all his twitches, all his moods. I was walking in a pitch-dark void, possessed by a great hunger. Once this hunger might have been characterized as a yearning for the life I had lost, but it had been transformed into a l.u.s.t for the life I might someday attain if I proved equal to the tests with which I was presented. That was all I knew of the land of Shades that it was a testing ground, less a place than a sequence of events. It was up to me to gain strength from the tests, to ease my hunger as best I could. I was ruled by this hunger, and it was my only wish to ease it.
Soon I spotted an island of brightness floating in the dark, and as I drew near, the brightness resolved into an old French plantation house fronted by tamarinds and rubber trees; sections of white stucco wall and a verandah and a red tile roof were visible between the trunks. Patterns of soft radiance overlaid the grounds, yet there were neither stars nor moon nor any source of light I could discern. I was not alarmed by this such discrepancies were typical of the Land of Shades.
When I reached the trees I paused, steeling myself for whatever lay ahead. Breezes sprang up to stir the leaves, and a sizzling chorus of crickets faded in from nowhere as if a recording of sensory detail had been switched on. Alert to every shift of shadow, I moved cautiously through the trees and up the verandah steps. Broken roof tiles crunched beneath my feet. Beside the door stood a bottomed-out cane chair; the rooms, however, were devoid of furnishings, the floors dusty, the whitewash flaking from the walls. The house appeared to be deserted, but I knew I was not alone. There was a hush in the air, the sort that arises from a secretive presence. Even had I failed to notice this, I could scarcely have missed the scent of perfume. I had never tested against a woman before, and, excited by the prospect, I was tempted to run through the house and ferret her out. But this would have been foolhardy, and I continued at a measured pace.
At the center of the house lay a courtyard, a rectangular s.p.a.ce choked with waist-high growths of jungle plants, dominated by a stone fountain in the shape of a stylized orchid. The woman was leaning against the fountain, and despite the grayish-green half-light a light that seemed to arise from the plants I could see she was beautiful. Slim and honey-colored, with falls of black hair spilling over the shoulders of her ao dai. She did not move or speak, but the casualness of her pose was an invitation. I felt drawn to her, and as I pushed through the foliage, the fleshy leaves clung to my thighs and groin, touches that seemed designed to provoke arousal. I stopped an arm"s length away and studied her. Her features were of a feline delicacy, and in the fullness of her lower lip, the petulant set of her mouth, I detected a trace of French breeding. She stared at me with palpable s.e.xual interest. It had not occurred to me that the confrontation might take place on a s.e.xual level, yet now I was certain this would be the case. I had to restrain myself from initiating the contact: there are rigorous formalities that must be observed prior to each test. And besides, I wanted to savor the experience.
"I am Tuyet," she said in a voice that seemed to combine the qualities of smoke and music.
"Stoner," I said.
The names hung in the air like the echoes of two gongs.
She lifted her hand as if to touch me, but lowered it: she, too, was practicing restraint. "I was a prost.i.tute," she said. "My home was Lai Khe, but I was an outcast. I worked the water points along Highway Thirteen."
It was conceivable, I thought, that I may have known her. While I had been laid up in An Loc, I"d frequented those water points: bomb craters that had been turned into miniature lakes by the rains and served as filling stations for the water trucks attached to the First Infantry. Every morning the wh.o.r.es and their mama sans would drive out to the water points in three-wheeled motorcycle trucks; with them would be vendors selling combs and pushb.u.t.ton knives and rubbers that came wrapped in gold foil, making them look like those disks of chocolate you can buy in the States. Most of these girls were more friendly than the city girls, and knowing that Tuyet had been one of them caused me to feel an affinity with her.
She went on to tell me that she had gone into the jungle with an American soldier and had been killed by a sniper. I told her my story in brief and then asked what she had learned of the Land of Shades. This is the most rigorous formality: I had never met anyone with whom I had failed to exchange information.
"Once," Tuyet said, "I met an old man, a Cao Dai medium from Black Virgin Mountain, who told me he had been to a place where a pillar of whirling light and dust joined earth to sky. Voices spoke from the pillar, sometimes many at once, and from them he understood that all wars are merely reflections of a deeper struggle, of a demon breaking free. The demon freed by our war, he said, was very strong, very dangerous. We the dead had been recruited to wage war against him."
I had been told a similar story by an NLF captain, and once, while crawling through a tunnel system, I myself had heard voices speaking from a skull half buried in the earth. But I had been too frightened to stay and listen. I related all this to Tuyet, and her response was to trail her fingers across my arm. My restraint, too, had frayed. I dragged her down into the thick foliage. It was as if we had been submerged in a sea of green light and fleshy stalks, as if the plantation house had vanished and we were adrift in an infinite vegetable depth where gravity had been replaced by some buoyant principle. I tore at her clothes, she at mine. Her ao dai shredded like crepe, and my fatigues came away in ribbons that dangled from her hooked fingers. Greedy for her, I pressed my mouth to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her nipples looked black in contrast to her skin, and it seemed I could taste their blackness, tart and sour. Our breathing was hoa.r.s.e, urgent, and the only other sound was the soft mulching of the leaves. With surprising strength, she pushed me onto my back and straddled my hips, guiding me inside her, sinking down until her b.u.t.tocks were grinding against my thighs.
Her head flung back, she lifted and lowered herself. The leaves and stalks churned and intertwined around us as if they, too, were copulating. For a few moments my hunger was a.s.suaged, but soon I noticed that the harder I thrust, the more fiercely she plunged, the less intense the sensations became. Though she gripped me tightly, the friction seemed to have been reduced. Frustrated, I dug my fingers into her plump hips and battered at her, trying to drive myself deeper. Then I squeezed one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and felt a searing pain to my palm. I s.n.a.t.c.hed back my hand and saw that her nipple, both nipples, were twisting, elongating; I realized that they had been transformed into the heads of two black centipedes, and the artful movements of her internal muscles...they were too artful, too disconnectedly in motion. An instant later I felt that same searing pain in my c.o.c.k and knew I was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g myself into a nest of creatures like those protruding from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. All her skin was rippling, reflecting the humping of thousands of centipedes beneath.
The pain was enormous, so much so that I thought my entire body must be glowing with it.
But I did not dare fail this test, and I continued pumping into her, thrusting harder than ever. The leaves thrashed, the stalks thrashed as in a gale, and the green light grew livid. Tuyet began to scream G.o.d knows what manner of pain I was causing her and her screams completed a perverse circuit within me. I found I could channel my own pain into those shrill sounds. Still joined to her, I rolled atop her, clamped her wrists together, and pinned them above her head. Her screams rang louder, inspiring me to greater efforts yet. Despite the centipedes tipping her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or perhaps because of them, because of the grotesque juxtaposition of the sensual and the horrid, her beauty seemed to have been enhanced, and my mastery over her actually provided me a modic.u.m of pleasure.
The light began to whiten, and looking off, I saw that we were being borne by an invisible current through as I had imagined an infinite depth of stalks and leaves. The stalks that lashed around us thickened far below into huge pale trunks with circular ribbing. I could not make out where they met the earth if, indeed, they did and they appeared to rise an equal height above. The light brightened further, casting the distant stalks in silhouette, and I realized we were drifting toward the source of the whiteness, beyond which would lie another test, another confrontation. I glanced at Tuyet. Her skin no longer displayed that obscene rippling, her nipples had reverted to normal. Pain was evolving into pleasure, but I knew it would be shortlived, and I tried to resist the current, to hold on to pain, because even pain was preferable to the hunger I would soon experience. Tuyet clawed my back, and I felt the first dissolute rush of my o.r.g.a.s.m. The current was irresistible. It flowed through my blood, my cells. It was part of me, or rather I was part of it. I let it move me, bringing me to completion.
Gradually the whipping of the stalks subsided to a pliant swaying motion. They parted for us, and we drifted through their interstices as serenely as a barge carved to resemble a coupling of two naked figures. I found I could not disengage from Tuyet, that the current enforced our union, and resigned to this, I gazed around, marveling at the vastness of this vegetable labyrinth and the strangeness of our fates. Beams of white light shined through the stalks, the brightness growing so profound that I thought I heard in it a roaring; and as my consciousness frayed, I saw myself reflected in Tuyet"s eyes a ragged dark creature wholly unlike my own self-image and wondered for the thousandth time who had placed us in this world, who had placed these worlds in us.
Other dreams followed, but they were ordinary, the dreams of an ordinarily anxious, ordinarily drunken man, and it was the memory of this first dream that dominated my waking moments. I didn"t want to wake because along with a headache and other symptoms of hangover I felt incredibly weak, incapable of standing and facing the world. Muzzy-headed, I ignored the reddish light prying under my eyelids and tried to remember more of the dream. Despite Stoner"s attempts to appear streetwise, despite the changes I had observed in him, he had been at heart an innocent and it was difficult to accept that the oddly formal, brutally s.e.xual protagonist of the dream had been in any way akin to him. Maybe, I thought, recalling Tuu"s theory of ghosts, maybe that was the quality that had died in Stoner: his innocence. I began once again to suffer guilt feelings over my hatred of him, and, preferring a hangover to that, I propped myself on one elbow and opened my eyes.
I doubt more than a second or two pa.s.sed before I sprang to my feet, hangover forgotten, electrified with fear; but in that brief span the reason for my weakness was made plain. Stoner was sitting close to where I had been lying, his hand outstretched to touch me, head down...exactly as he had sat the previous day. Aside from his pose, however, very little about him was the same.
The scene was of such complexity that now, thinking back on it, it strikes me as implausible that I could have noticed its every detail; yet I suppose that its power was equal to its complexity and thus I did not so much see it as it was imprinted on my eyes. Dawn was a crimson smear fanning across the lower sky, and the palms stood out blackly against it, their fronds twitching in the breeze like spiders impaled on pins. The ruddy light gave the rutted dirt of the street the look of a trough full of congealed blood. Stoner was motionless that is to say, he didn"t move his limbs, his head, or shift his position; but his image was pulsing, swelling to half again its normal size and then deflating, all with the rhythm of steady breathing. As he expanded, the cold white fire blazing from his eyes would spread in cracks that veined his entire form; as he contracted, the cracks would disappear and for a moment he would be except for his eyes the familiar figure I had known. It seemed that his outward appearance his fatigues and helmet, his skin was a sh.e.l.l from which some glowing inner man was attempting to break free. Grains of dust were whirling up from the ground beside him, more and more all the time: a miniature cyclone wherein he sat calm and ultimately distracted, the likeness of a warrior monk whose meditations had borne fruit.
Shouts behind me. I turned and saw Fierman, Tuu, Witcover, and various of the gooks standing at the edge of the village. Tuu beckoned to me, and I wanted to comply, to run, but I wasn"t sure I had the strength. And, too, I didn"t think Stoner would let me. His power surged around me, a cold windy voltage that whipped my clothes and set static charges crackling in my hair. "Turn it off!" I shouted, pointing at the tin-roofed building. They shook their heads, shouting in return. "...can"t," I heard, and something about "...feedback."
Then Stoner spoke. "Puleo," he said. His voice wasn"t loud, but it was all-encompa.s.sing. I seemed to be inside it, balanced on a tongue of red dirt, within a throat of sky and jungle and yellow stone. I turned back to him. Looked into his eyes...fell into them, into a world of cold brilliance where a thousand fiery forms were materialized and dispersed every second, forms both of such beauty and hideousness that their effect on me, their beholder, was identical, a confusion of terror and exaltation. Whatever they were, the forms of Stoner"s spirit, his potentials, or even of his thoughts, they were in their momentary life more vital and consequential than I could ever hope to be. Compelled by them, I walked over to him. I must have been afraid I could feel wetness on my thighs and realized that my bladder had emptied but he so dominated me that I knew only the need to obey. He did not stand, yet with each expansion his image would loom up before my eyes and I would stare into that dead face seamed by rivulets of molten diamond, its expression losing coherence, features splitting apart. Then he would shrink, leaving me gazing dumbly down at the top of his helmet. Dust stung my eyelids, my cheeks.
"What" I began, intending to ask what he wanted; but before I could finish, he seized my wrist. Ice flowed up my arm, shocking my heart, and I heard myself...not screaming. No, this was the sound life makes leaving the body, like the squealing of gas released from a balloon that"s half pinched shut.
Within seconds, drained of strength, I slumped to the ground, my vision reduced to a darkening fog. If he had maintained his hold much longer, I"m sure I would have died...and I was resigned to the idea. I had no weapon with which to fight him. But then I realized that the cold had receded from my limbs. Dazed, I looked around, and when I spotted him, I tried to stand, to run. Neither my arms nor legs would support me, and desperate I flopped on the red dirt, trying to crawl to safety; but after that initial burst of panic, the gland that governed my reactions must have overloaded, because I stopped crawling, rolled onto my back and stayed put, feeling stunned, weak, transfixed by what I saw. Yet not in the least afraid.
Stoner"s inner man, now twice human-size, had broken free and was standing at the center of the village, some twenty feet off a bipedal silhouette through which it seemed you could look forever into a dimension of fire and crystal, like a hole burned in the fabric of the world. His movements were slow, tentative, as if he hadn"t quite adapted to his new form, and penetrating him, arcing through the air from the tin-roofed building, their substance flowing toward him, were what appeared to be thousands of translucent wires, the structures of the fields. As I watched, they began to glow with Stoner"s blue-white-diamond color, their substance to reverse its flow and pour back toward the building, and to emit a ba.s.s hum. Dents popped in the tin roof, the walls bulged inward, and with a grinding noise, a narrow fissure forked open in the earth beside it. The glowing wires grew brighter and brighter, and the building started to crumple, never collapsing, but as if giant hands were pushing at it from every direction compacting with terrible slowness until it had been squashed to perhaps a quarter of its original height. The hum died away. A fire broke out in the wreckage, pale flames leaping high and winnowing into black smoke.
Somebody clutched my shoulder, hands hauled me to my feet. It was Tuu and one of his soldiers. Their faces were knitted by lines of concern, and that concern rekindled my fear. I clawed at them, full of grat.i.tude, and let them hustle me away. We took our places among the other observers, the smoking building at our backs, all gazing at the yellow houses and the burning giant in their midst.
The air around Stoner had become murky, turbulent, and this turbulence spread to obscure the center of the village. He stood unmoving, while small dust devils kicked up at his heels and went zipping about like a G.o.d"s zany pets. One of the houses caved in with a whump, and pieces of yellow concrete began to lift from the ruins, to float toward Stoner; drawing near him, they acquired some of his brightness, glowing in their own right, and then vanished into the turbulence. Another house imploded, and the same process was initiated. The fact that all this was happening in dead silence except for the caving in of the houses made it seem even more eerie and menacing than if there had been sound.
The turbulence eddied faster and faster, thickening, and at last a strange vista faded in from the dark air, taking its place the way the picture melts up from the screen of an old television set. Four or five minutes must have pa.s.sed before it became completely clear, and then it seemed sharper and more in focus than did the jungle and the houses, more even than the blazing figure who had summoned it: an acre-sized patch of h.e.l.l or heaven or something in between, shining through the dilapidated structures and shabby colors of the ordinary, paling them. Beyond Stoner lay a vast forested plain dotted with fires...or maybe they weren"t fires but some less chaotic form of energy, for though they gave off smoke, the flames maintained rigorous stylized shapes, showing like red fountains and poinsettias and other shapes yet against the poisonous green of the trees. Smoke hung like a gray pall over the plain and now and again beams of radiance all so complexly figured, they appeared to be pillars of crystal would shoot up from the forest into the grayness and resolve into a burst of light; and at the far limit of the plain, beyond a string of ragged hills, the dark sky would intermittently flash reddish orange as if great batteries of artillery were homing in upon some target there.
I had thought that Stoner would set forth at once into this other world, but instead he backed a step away and I felt despair for him, fear that he wouldn"t seize his opportunity to escape. It may seem odd that I still thought of him as Stoner, and it may be that prior to that moment I had forgotten his human past; but now, sensing his trepidation, I understood that what enlivened this awesome figure was some sc.r.a.p of soul belonging to the man-child I once had known. Silently, I urged him on. Yet he continued to hesitate.
It wasn"t until someone tried to pull me back that I realized I was moving toward Stoner. I shook off whoever it was, walked to the edge of the village, and called Stoner"s name. I didn"t really expect him to acknowledge me, and I"m not clear as to what my motivations were: maybe it was just that since I had come this far with him I didn"t want my efforts wasted. But I think it was something more, some old loyalty resurrected, one I had denied while he was alive.
"Get outta here!" I shouted. "Go on! Get out!"
He turned that blind, fiery face toward me and despite its featurelessness, I could read therein the record of his solitude, his fears concerning its resolution. It was, I knew, a final sending. I sensed again his emptiness, but it wasn"t so harrowing and hopeless as before; in it there was a measure of determination, of purpose, and, too, a kind of...I"m tempted to say grat.i.tude, but in truth it was more a simple acknowledgment, like the wave of a hand given by one workman to another after the completion of a difficult task. "Go." I said it softly, the way you"d speak when urging a child to take his first step, and Stoner walked away.
For a few moments, though his legs moved, he didn"t appear to be making any headway; his figure remained undiminished by distance. There was a tension in the air, an almost impalpable disturbance that quickly evolved into a heated pulse. One of the banana trees burst into flames, its leaves shriveling; a second tree ignited, a third, and soon all those trees close to the demarcation of that other world were burning like green ceremonial candles. The heat intensified, and the veils of dust that blew toward me carried a stinging residue of that heat; the sky for hundreds of feet above rippled as with the effects of an immense conflagration.
I stumbled back, tripped, and fell heavily. When I recovered I saw that Stoner was receding, that the world into which he was traveling was receding with him, or rather seeming to fold, to bisect and collapse around him: it looked as if that plain dotted with fires were painted on a curtain, and as he pushed forward, the fabric was drawn with him, its painted distances becoming foreshortened, its perspectives exaggerated and surreal, molding into a tunnel that conformed to his shape. His figure shrank to half its previous size, and then some limit reached, some barrier penetrated the heat died away, its dissipation accompanied by a seething hiss, and Stoner"s white fire began to shine brighter and brighter, his form eroding in brightness. I had to shield my eyes, then shut them; but even so, I could see the soundless explosion that followed through my lids, and for several minutes I could make out its vague afterimage. A blast of wind pressed me flat, hot at first, but blowing colder and colder, setting my teeth to chattering. At last this subsided, and on opening my eyes I found that Stoner had vanished, and where the plain had been now lay a wreckage of yellow stone and seared banana trees, ringed by a few undamaged houses on the perimeter.
The only sound was the crackle of flames from the tin-roofed building. Moments later, however, I heard a patter of applause. I looked behind me: the gooks were all applauding Tuu, who was smiling and bowing like the author of a successful play. I was shocked at their reaction. How could they be concerned with accolades? Hadn"t they been dazzled, as I had, their humanity diminished by the mystery and power of Stoner"s metamorphosis? I went over to them, and drawing near, I overheard an officer congratulate Tuu on "another triumph." It took me a while to register the significance of those words, and when I did I pushed through the group and confronted Tuu.
" "Another triumph"?" I said.
He met my eyes, imperturbable. "I wasn"t aware you spoke our language, Mr. Puleo."
"You"ve done this before," I said, getting angry. "Haven"t you?"
"Twice before." He tapped a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros; an officer rushed to light it. "But never with an American spirit."
"You coulda killed me!" I shouted, lunging for him. Two soldiers came between us, menacing me with their rifles.
Tuu blew out a plume of smoke that seemed to give visible evidence of his self-satisfaction. "I told you it was a risk," he said. "Does it matter that I knew the extent of the risk and you did not? You were in no greater danger because of that. We were prepared to take steps if the situation warranted."
"Don"t bulls.h.i.t me! You couldn"t have done nothin" with Stoner!"
He let a smile nick the corners of his mouth.
"You had no right," I said. "You"
Tuu"s face hardened. "We had no right to mislead you? Please, Mr. Puleo. Between our peoples, deception is a tradition."
I fumed, wanting to get at him. Frustrated, I slugged my thigh with my fist, spun on my heel, and walked off. The two soldiers caught up with me and blocked my path. Furious, I swatted at their rifles; they disengaged their safeties and aimed at my stomach.
"If you wish to be alone," Tuu called, "I have no objection to you taking a walk. We have tests to complete. But please keep to the road. A car will come for you."
Before the soldiers could step aside, I pushed past them.
"Keep to the road, Mr. Puleo!" In Tuu"s voice was more than a touch of amus.e.m.e.nt. "If you recall, we"re quite adept at tracking."
Anger was good for me; it kept my mind off what I had seen. I wasn"t ready to deal with Stoner"s evolution. I wanted to consider things in simple terms: a man I had hated had died to the world a second time and I had played a part in his release, a part in which I had no reason to take pride or bear shame, because I had been manipulated every step of the way. I was so full of anger, I must have done the first mile in under fifteen minutes, the next in not much more. By then the sun had risen above the treeline and I had worked up a sweat. Insects buzzed; monkeys screamed. I slowed my pace and turned my head from side to side as I went, as if I were walking point again. I had the idea my own ghost was walking with me, shifting around inside and burning to get out on its own.
After an hour or so I came to the temporary housing that had been erected for the populace of Cam Le: thatched huts; scrawny dogs slinking and chickens pecking; orange peels, palm litter, and piles of s.h.i.t in the streets. Some old men smoking pipes by a cookfire blinked at me. Three girls carrying plastic jugs giggled, ran off behind a hut, and peeked back around the corner.
Vietnam.
I thought about the way I"d used to sneer the word. "Nam, I"d say. Viet-f.u.c.king-nam! Now it was spoken proudly, printed in Twentieth Century-Fox monolithic capitals, brazen with hype. Perhaps between those two extremes was a mode of expression that captured the ordinary reality of the place, the poverty and peacefulness of this village; but if so, it wasn"t accessible to me.
Some of the villagers were coming out of their doors to have a look at the stranger. I wondered if any of them recognized me. Maybe, I thought, chuckling madly, maybe if I bashed a couple on the head and screamed "Number Ten VC!" maybe then they"d remember. I suddenly felt tired and empty, and I sat down by the road to wait. I was so distracted, I didn"t notice at first that a number of flies had mistaken me for a new and bigger piece of s.h.i.t and were orbiting me, crawling over my knuckles. I flicked them away, watched them spiral off and land on other parts of my body. I got into controlling their patterns of flight, seeing if I could make them all congregate on my left hand, which I kept still. Weird shudders began pa.s.sing through my chest, and the vacuum inside my head filled with memories of Stoner, his bizarre dream, his terrible Valhalla. I tried to banish them, but they stuck there, replaying themselves over and over. I couldn"t order them, couldn"t derive any satisfaction from them. Like the pa.s.sage of a comet, Stoner"s escape from Cam Le had been a trivial cosmic event, causing momentary awe and providing a few more worthless clues to the nature of the absolute, but offering no human solutions. Nothing consequential had changed for me: I was as f.u.c.ked up as ever, as hard-core disoriented. The buzzing sunlight grew hotter and hotter; the flies" dance quickened in the rippling air.
At long last a dusty car with a gook corporal at the wheel pulled up beside me. Fierman and Witcover were in back, and Witcover"s eye was discolored, swollen shut. I went around to the pa.s.senger side, opened the front door, and heard behind me a spit-filled explosive sound. Turning, I saw that a kid of about eight or nine had jumped out of hiding to ambush me. He had a dirt-smeared belly that popped from the waist of his ragged shorts, and he was aiming a toy rifle made of sticks. He shot me again, jiggling the gun to simulate automatic fire. Little monster with slit black eyes. Staring daggers at me, thinking I"d killed his daddy. He probably would have loved it if I had keeled over, clutching my chest; but I wasn"t in the mood. I pointed my finger, c.o.c.ked the thumb, and shot him down like a dog.
He stared meanly and fired a third time: this was serious business, and he wanted me to die. "Row-nal Ray-gun," he said, and pretended to spit.
I just laughed and climbed into the car. The gook corporal engaged the gears, and we sped off into a boil of dust and light, as if like Stoner we were pa.s.sing through a metaphysical barrier between worlds. My head bounced against the back of the seat, and with each impact I felt that my thoughts were clearing, that a poisonous sediment was being jolted loose and flushed from my bloodstream. Thick silence welled from the rear of the car, and not wanting to ride with hostiles all the way to Saigon, I turned to Witcover and apologized for having hit him. Pressure had done it to me, I told him. That, and bad memories of a bad time. His features tightened into a sour knot and he looked out the window, wholly unforgiving. But I refused to allow his response to disturb me let him have his petty hate, his grudge, for whatever good it would do him and I turned away to face the violent green sweep of the jungle, the great troubled rush of the world ahead, with a heart that seemed lighter by an ounce of anger, by one bitterness removed. To the end of that pa.s.sion, at least, I had become reconciled.
The Function of Dream Sleep.