The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
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of the politicians. They’re all sleazy socialists and caviar communists.
I totally agree, I said, performing my best yes-man act.
But even if you’re not a politician or an intellectual—he turned his palms to me so I could see the map of his toil, the scars and calluses of his personal geography—that doesn’t mean you can’t get rich by working with your hands.
This is a new opportunity. A new market.
Grow or die. That’s my thinking.
It’s a good philosophy.
He checked the symmetrical white cuticles of his fingernails, manicured at a nail salon that he owned, then looked at me again. If eyes were the windows to a soul, he had blackout curtains pulled shut behind his. What do you want?
What I wanted was revenge, but as I watched myself with that unfeeling sense that I was a stranger even to me, all I heard myself say was: You supply, I sell.
He named a price for the goods, per gram. I explained that I was a refugee working a menial job—not that there was anything wrong with the job he had given me, all refugees have to start somewhere, that somewhere being at the bottom, where we offered our bottom to be kicked, which provided endless merriment for the citizenry of our host countries. The point was that I did not have the capital to purchase the goods. Instead of investing my nonexistent financial capital in his goods, I offered to barter my social capital, my access to my aunt’s friends, for his goods. In exchange, I would expand his market and deliver to him profits he would not otherwise have, divided fifty-fifty between us, after deducting the cost of the goods.
Something behind the curtains twitched. Thirty percent.
Forty percent.
He was amused. Twenty-five percent.
It was difficult to negotiate with someone who could take a hammer out of his desk drawer and break your knuckles or kneecaps without compunction or hesitation. You’re too generous, I said. The Boss nodded toward the door and told me to see Le Cao Boi, who would provide me with the goods. In parting he said, I’m not sure whether you’re less crazy or more crazy for wanting to do this.
I’m not crazy.
That’s what the crazy ones always say.
Looking back, it is clear to me now, as it must be to you, that perhaps the balance between my two minds, always precarious, had suddenly tilted too far right, into a place where I could watch myself becoming more and more about me and me alone, the best justification there was for capitalism. Did that make me crazy, as the Boss and many others have claimed? Maybe I was crazy, or a little bit crazy, or maybe I was simply flawed. Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others. Perhaps Saïd wanted to be human, too, despite being a drug dealer, or perhaps he was smarter than me and took his humanity for granted, which allowed him to be a drug dealer, as he had nothing to prove. Now he had disappeared and left an opportunity, a void in the market. Someone would eventually fill that void. Why not me?
By the time I arrived at the restaurant, an answer was waiting for my rhetorical question, a square brown paper package the size of a croque monsieur, wrapped with string. Sliding the package across the countertop, Le Cao Boi said, Glad you’ve decided to join us. His face was statuesque in its impassivity, the faint ghosts of me and myself floating in the lenses of his sunglasses. I matched his impassivity as I accepted the package and slipped it into a jacket pocket, where it rested against my hip with a pistol’s patience, utterly confident that it would, sooner or later, be used.
Bon watched the transaction from a table where he was refilling bottles of soy sauce with a chemist’s precision, the only person sitting in the barren restaurant. I hope you know what you’re doing, smart guy, he said.
Of course I don’t, I said, implying in my lighthearted way that I indeed did know what I was doing, even if, in fact, I did not. And it will give me a chance to improve my French, I went on. Nothing makes people more talkative than mutual intoxication.
You could just go to school to refine your French.
Yes, but you always told me that not all the answers can be found in books.
I’ll tell you what else you can’t find in a book, Le Cao Boi said. The Boss expects at least a twenty percent return. He doesn’t like to waste his time. Or his goods. In other words, you better make this little investment worthwhile.
Hey, new guy, Sleepy called out from the kitchen. The toilet needs cleaning!
I left the worst Asian restaurant in Paris with the sound of Sleepy’s laughter in my ears, the scent of disinfectant on my hands, and the taste of bile on my tongue. Only a shot of revenge could wash that taste away. I would not be the obsequious Asiatic object of pity, the pathetic or polite little refugee who would agree to begin from the beginning, as a student of my master’s language—
Hey you!
—or as a waiter or a busboy or a dishwasher—
You!
—or a plumber—
YOU!
I froze. The voice, loud and stern, seemed aimed at me, although I was not the only one on the street who turned. Everyone around me pivoted to see a pair of policemen striding toward us, the one in front pointing his finger at me. I knew exactly why. Something was transmitting a signal on the invisible airwaves. Although the packet in my pocket was silent, that did not mean it had nothing to say. No, it exuded a sense of confidence, perhaps even a touch of menace, as all valuable things did. It had power over me, as it was well aware. I could throw it away, of course, destroy it in any number of ways, and it could do nothing to stop me—except simply by existing.
YOU!
The policemen suddenly broke into a run, and my body and mind became quite calm as they braced themselves. I had felt that same stillness on the boat as it soared into the sky, borne on the wave. Hashish, the packet in my pocket whispered, knowing only its own name. Hashish. It knew that it was literally more valuable than me. It had a price that people were willing to pay, whereas my life had almost no value at all. Because no one would pay for me what one would for the goods in the packet, I was now in debt to it. I was about to raise my hands in surrender to it and to the policemen, but they charged right past me, one on either side, close enough that their sleeves brushed mine.
YOU!
They were not shouting at me after all, but at a shambolic man whose hair was so unkempt and skin was so unwashed that he was of indeterminate race or ethnicity, which was the French ideal. Everyone could be French, including the homeless!
One policeman jerked a beer can from the bewildered bum’s hand and shoved him against a wall. The other cop kicked him in the seat of his pants and sent him nearly tumbling to the ground, all while the rest of the upstanding citizens—and me, not to mention myself—stood watching. When the policeman with the beer can hurled it at the back of the bewildered bum, splashing him with its contents, which seemed to defeat the purpose of making him less hideous to Parisian eyes, I averted my own eyes and walked past the scene in silence.
That night, my aunt and I smoked the finest hashish and drank the finest Haut-Médoc and listened to the finest American jazz, that black-and-blue music so beloved by the French partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism. Since I was also black and blue all over, at least on the inside, Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” was a perfect accompaniment for me. And then there was my aunt, who had finished my confession and was feeling kind of blue herself. She remained unbothered by what had happened to me, imprisoned with a thousand fetid fellows for a year on starvation rations, forced to write and rewrite a confession, and then, for the coup de grâce, thrown into solitary confinement, naked, with sacks over my head, hands, and feet, periodically jolted by low-level electricity that kept me awake for an unknown amount of time, until I could no longer distinguish