The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
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they were not cute and not even that dwarfish, being merely nasty, brutish, and short. Most notable, as I pointed out to Le Cao Boi, was that seven of them seemed excessive for a restaurant empty at noon on a weekend. He grinned and said, Makes you wonder why the Boss would send me two more employees, doesn’t it?
As must be obvious even to a tourist or stranger, the restaurant was not surviving on its culinary output, being instead an outpost for the Boss’s ambitions to expand from the ghetto of Little Asia to inner Paris, the heart of whiteness, even with its shadows of darkness. This outpost was a front for Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarfs, who, besides being short, were angry and ambidextrous. Their favored weapons were cleavers, functional in the kitchen and on assignment, when they would each carry two of the big blades sheathed under their armpits in custom leather holsters.
They’re angry because they’re short, Le Cao Boi said. And they’re hard to beat because they’re short. Someone takes a swing at where they think their heads should be and they hit air. You don’t want all seven coming at you at once, but that’s how they do their job. One cuts off your manhood, another slices your kneecaps, a third hamstrings you, all at the same time. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. But they’re not great on nuance. “Nuance” is not in their vocabulary. Hell, “vocabulary” is not in their vocabulary. That’s what you’re here for.
Le Cao Boi adjusted his aviator sunglasses, which he never removed, not even during lovemaking, or so it was said, especially by him. He was proud of their name-brand status as authentic American Ray-Bans, not, as he liked to point out, cheap imitations. Le Cao Boi was fashion-conscious, from designer socks to hair so streamlined with pomade that not a strand moved regardless of whether he was declaiming poetry (his own), making love (energetically), or swinging his favored weapon, a baseball bat gifted by an American cousin. It was Le Cao Boi’s bitter experience to come as a refugee to France instead of America, the country for which he pined during his youth in Cholon. Le Cao Boi, like the Boss, was ethnic Chinese, son of a Cholon gangster and grandson of a Guangdong merchant who had settled in Saigon at century’s turn. The grandfather sold silk and opium, the father sold only opium, and the grandson sold nothing except his violent services, a great decline over which he ruminated often in his poetry, which was so unspeakably bad that none of it will be quoted here.
Just think of me as Baudelaire with a baseball bat, he said, showing us his prized Louisville Slugger. What a name, he added, rolling the baseball bat on the counter where the depressed cash register stood, its sole purpose in life—to have its keys punched—hardly ever achieved. So, what should we call you? You’re Killer, that’s obvious. I wouldn’t want to see your face when I open the door. But you! Le Cao Boi turned his reflective gaze to me. The Boss said you already had a name. Know what it is?
He offered a smile, the kind that the Americans he admired so much called a “shit-eating grin,” a phrase whose meaning was the exact opposite of what one would suppose. Hello, Crazy Bastard, Le Cao Boi said. I’ve heard a lot about you.
Once, I would have taken offense. But after all I had suffered and seen, perhaps I actually was a crazy bastard. Perhaps that was just another name for a man with two faces and two minds. If so, at least I knew who I was, and that was more than could be said for most. The dual images of myself floating in his lenses reminded me that I was not one but two, not only me or moi but also, on occasion, we or us. We might have been two people in one body, two minds in one shell, but if this was a weakness, to be divided against oneself, it was also a strength, to be one’s own twin. We were not half of anything. As my mother had told me time and again, You are twice of everything!
Okay, enough chitchat, Le Cao Boi said. Small talk kills me. Let’s get to work.
Hey, chief, said one of the dwarfs, emerging from the back of the restaurant. He had droopy eyelids. Grumpy did it again.
Du ma! Le Cao Boi said. Well, why don’t you do something about it?
Du ma! Sleepy said, pointing at me. He’s the new guy.
Good point. Le Cao Boi nodded at me. Follow Sleepy. He’ll show you what to do. After that, we get to the real work.
I followed Sleepy to the back of the restaurant. He paused before a grimy door and said, with a grin, Got to start from the bottom and work your way up, right?
Sleepy laughed mightily at his joke and seemed somewhat resentful when I did not laugh in turn. Grumbling, he kicked open the door and said, Got to keep your hands clean. Clean hands, clean food, am I right? When Sleepy noticed me gagging, tears coming to my eyes, he stood on his tiptoes outside the open door to look down into the toilet and said, Jesus Christ. Ugh. I mean . . . good luck, new guy.
I saw no sign of rubber gloves, not that the interior of such gloves would have been sanitary. The only tools for the excavation of the clogged orifice were a plunger with a short handle and a woefully small rubber cup, as well as a soiled toothbrush of a toilet scrub. If either the plunger or the scrub could speak, they would undoubtedly scream eternally, as I was already doing internally.
I emerged from the toilet some twenty minutes later, trembling and trying not to think of the fine droplets of water that had sprayed all over my clothes and possibly even misted my arms and face. I had seen worse in the refugee camp, but this was supposed to be the City of Light!
All done? Le Cao Boi said. I keep telling Grumpy not to eat the food here. Fair warning. Okay, let’s go. There’s a debt to be collected.
Our destination was in the Marais, popular with Jews and faggots, according to Le Cao Boi, although our target was neither. What he was, Le Cao Boi said, was a client who liked to beat the girls, which could be acceptable, depending on the payment. What was not acceptable was that he had accrued a debt for which he was now in arrears.
Never go into debt for a woman, said Le Cao Boi, pausing outside the door to a travel agency to let a Japanese tourist wander by, a zoom lens the length of his forearm attached to a camera around his neck. Inside, a young couple sat before the travel agent, whose only crime appeared to be combining a knit tie with a short-sleeved plaid shirt. His eyes twitched in fear at the sight of two and a half Asian men who did not appear to be respectable bourgeoisie seeking respite from the low-grade demands of 1980s French capitalism. Bon sat down in the chair next to the young couple and stared at the client. Le Cao Boi explained that we would wait, they should take their time, the Spanish coast was beautiful this time of year. The next few minutes passed awkwardly, at least for the travel agent, with Le Cao Boi meandering around the office, whistling “Stairway to Heaven” as he ran his finger along the posters of beaches and palm trees on the walls, the brochures on the counter, and the backs of the chairs on which the young couple sat.
Bon remained next to them, staring only at the travel agent but keeping the couple in his peripheral vision. They glanced at each other as the travel agent began stuttering, fingers trembling over the binder of travel packages. I watched them all while I stood silently with my back to the wall by the door, and when the young couple smiled nervously and promised to return, I opened the door for them. The travel agent waved his hands at Le Cao Boi and alternated between explaining and begging, but Le Cao Boi ignored him and said to Bon, He’s a thief who beats girls. We couldn’t give you a better job to begin with, could we?
No, you couldn’t have. Bon stood up. This will be easy. At least for me.
As I watched the travel agent tremble and moan as he curled up on the spotless floor—Bon being careful not to extract blood—I understood with a sudden twist of shame that I shared something in common with this man, besides our plaintive desire to live. I also shared his manhood, his lust, his febrile brain that could not pass ten minutes without a sexual fantasy crossing its field of vision. Men were all the same, or at least 90 to 95 percent of them. Bon, perhaps, might be an exception, so pure of heart that even in the oceanic depths of his mind and soul he did not fantasize about the opposite sex. But most men will. And I—I was like most men.
I wept a little for the travel agent, but more for me and myself and my mother, who had to watch me in dismay from above. Le Cao Boi sniffed in disgust, not over the battered travel agent but over my tears. Pull yourself together, man, he said outside the door of the agency.
Bon,