The Sympathizer

He raised his hand to me in farewell, and on his palm blazed the red mark of our oath. With that, he left. Those are the most dangerous words you can hear, Sonny said, sitting down on the vacated chair. The crapulent major joined him, pushing him aside for room. “For your own good” can only mean something bad, he said. As if on cue, the speakers mounted high in the corners clicked and hummed, the ones I had only noticed when the commissar played for me my own stranger’s voice. The question of what would be done to me was answered when somebody began screaming, and while Sonny and the crapulent major could clap their hands over their ears I could not. But even with ears protected, Sonny and the crapulent major could not endure this screaming for more than a minute, this shrieking of a baby in torment, and in the blink of an eye they, too, vanished.

Somewhere a baby was screaming, its suffering shared with me, who needed no more. I saw myself squeeze my eyes shut, as if that could also squeeze my ears shut. It was impossible to think with the screaming in this examination room, and for the first time in a very long time I wanted something more than sleep. I wanted silence. Oh, please—I heard myself crying this aloud—stop! Then another click, and the screaming ceased. A tape! I was listening to a tape. No baby was being tortured in some nearby chamber, its howls piped into mine. It was just a recording, and for a few more moments I only had to worry about the unceasing light and heat and the rubber band snap of the electric wire against my little toe. But then I heard the click again, and my body clenched in anticipation. Somebody began screaming once more. Somebody was screaming so loudly that I not only lost track of myself, I lost track of time. Time no longer ran straight as a railroad; time no longer rotated on a dial; time no longer crawled under my back; time was infinitely looping, a cassette tape repeating without end; time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwaches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history. We were, all of us, running out of time, except for the malevolent baby. The baby who was screaming had all the time in the world, and the irony was that the baby did not even know it.

Please—I heard myself again—stop! I’ll do anything you want! How was it that the most vulnerable creature in the world could also be the most powerful? Did I scream like this at my mother? If so, forgive me, Mama! If I screamed, it was not because of you. I am one but I am also two, made from an egg and a sperm, and if I screamed, it must be because of those blue genes gleaned from my father. I saw it now, that moment of my origin, the Chinese acrobat of time bent impossibly back on itself so that I could see the invasion of my mother’s womb by my father’s dumb, masculine horde, a howling gang of helmeted, hell-bent nomads intent on piercing the great wall of my mother’s egg. From this invasion, the nothing that I was became the somebody that I am. Somebody was screaming and it was not the baby. My cell divided, and divided, and divided again, until I was a million cells and more, until I was multitudes and multitudes, my own country, my own nation, the emperor and dictator of the masses of myself, commanding my mother’s undivided attention. Somebody was screaming and it was the agent. I was packed tight into my mother’s aquarium, knowing nothing of independence and freedom, witness by all my senses except the sense of sight to the uncanniest experience of all, being inside another human being. I was a doll within a doll, hypnotized by a metronome ticking with perfect regularity, my mother’s strong and steady heartbeat. Somebody was screaming and it was my mother. Her voice was the first sound I heard when I emerged headfirst, thrust into a humid room as warm as the womb, seized by the gnarled hands of an unimpressed doula who would tell me, years later, how she had used her sharpened thumbnail to slice the tight frenulum holding down my tongue, the better for me to suckle and to talk. This was also the woman who told me, with glee, of how my mother pushed so hard she expelled not only me but also the waste from her bowels, washing me onto the shores of a strange new world in a maternal effluence of blood and excrement. Somebody was screaming and I did not know who it was. My leash was cut and my naked, smeared purple self was turned toward a throbbing light, revealing to me a world of shadows and dim shapes speaking my mother tongue, a foreign language. Somebody was screaming and I knew who it was. It was me, screaming the one word that had dangled before me since the question was first asked—nothing—the answer that I could neither see nor hear until now—nothing!—the answer I screamed again and again and again—nothing!—because I was, at last, enlightened.





CHAPTER 23