The theory was as harebrained as his others, but I wasn’t able to deny it. I knew he was partly right, that a moral filament had snapped inside me during the war and since that time I had lacked the ingredient necessary to the development of a generous soul. Now it seemed that I could feel that lack as a restless presence straining against my flesh. The sawing of the crickets intensified, and I had a rush of paranoia, wondering if Tuu was fucking with my head. Then, moods shifting at the chemical mercies of the dope, my paranoia eroded and Tuu snapped into focus for me…or at least his ghost did. He had, I recalled, written poetry prior to the war, and I thought I saw the features of that lost poet melting up from his face: a dreamy fellow given to watching petals fall and contemplating the moon’s reflection. I closed my eyes, trying to get a grip. This was the best dope I’d ever smoked. Commie Pink, pure buds of the revolution.
“Are you worried about tomorrow?” Tuu asked.
“Should I be?”
“I can only tell you what I did before—no one has been harmed.”
“What happened during those other experiments?” I asked.
“Very little, really. Stoner approached each subject, spoke to them. Then he lost interest and wandered off.”
“Spoke to them? Could they hear him?”
“Faintly. However, considering his reaction to you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could hear him quite well.”
I wasn’t thrilled by that prospect. Having to look at Stoner was bad enough. I thought about the eerie shit he might say: admonitory pronouncements, sad questions, windy vowels gusting from his strange depths. Tuu said something and had to repeat it to snap me out of my reverie. He asked how it felt to be back in Vietnam, and without forethought, I said it wasn’t a problem.
“And the first time you were here,” he said, an edge to his voice. “Was that a problem?”
“What are you gettin’ at?”
“I noticed in your records that you were awarded a Silver Star.”
“Yeah?”
“You must have been a good soldier. I wondered if you might not have found a calling in war.”
“If you’re askin’ what I think about the war,” I said, getting pissed, “I don’t make judgments about it. It was a torment for me, nothing more. Its geopolitical consequences, cultural effects, they’re irrelevant to me…maybe they’re ultimately irrelevant. Though I doubt you’d agree.”
“We may agree more than you suspect.” He sighed pensively. “For both of us, apparently, the war was a passion. In your case, an agonizing one. In mine, while there was also agony, it was essentially a love affair with revolution, with the idea of revolution. And as with all great passions, what was most alluring was not the object of passion but the new depth of my own feelings. Thus I was blind to the realities underlying it. Now”—he waved at the sky, the trees—“now I inhabit those realities and I am not as much in love as once I was. Yet no matter how extreme my disillusionment, the passion continues. I want it to continue. I need the significance with which it imbues my past actions.” He studied me. “Isn’t that how it is for you? You say war was a torment, but don’t you find those days empowering?”
Just as when he had offered me the joint, I realized that I didn’t want this sort of peaceful intimacy with him; I preferred him to be my inscrutable enemy. Maybe he was right, maybe—like him—I needed this passion to continue in order to give significance to my past. Whatever, I felt vulnerable to him, to my perception of his humanity. “Good night,” I said, getting to my feet. My ass was numb from sitting and soaked with dew.
He gazed up at me, unreadable, and fingered something from his shirt pocket. Another joint. He lit up, exhaling a billow of smoke. “Good night,” he said coldly.
The next morning—sunny, cloudless—I staked myself out on the red dirt of Cam Le to wait for Stoner. Nervous, I paced back and forth until the air began to ripple and he materialized less than thirty feet away. He walked slowly toward me, his rifle dangling; a drop of sweat carved a cold groove across my rib cage. “Puleo,” he said, and this time I heard him. His voice was faint, but it shook me.
Looking into his blown-out pupils, I was reminded of a day not long before he had died. We had been hunkered down together after a firefight, and our eyes had met, had locked as if sealed by a vacuum: like two senile old men, incapable of any communication aside from a recognition of the other’s vacancy. As I remembered this, it hit home to me that though he hadn’t been a friend, he was my brother-in-arms, and that as such, I owed him more than journalistic interest.
“Stoner!” I hadn’t intended to shout, but in that outcry was a wealth of repressed emotion, of regret and guilt and anguish at not being able to help him elude the fate by which he had been overtaken.
He stopped short; for an instant the hopelessness drained from his face. His image was undergoing that uncanny sharpening of focus: sweat beads popping from his brow, a scab appearing on his chin. The lines of strain around his mouth and eyes were etched deep, filled in with grime, like cracks in his tan.
Tides of emotion were washing over me, and irrational though it seemed, I knew that some of these emotions—the fierce hunger for life in particular—were Stoner’s. I believe we had made some sort of connection, and all our thoughts were in flux between us. He moved toward me again. My hands trembled, my knees buckled, and I had to sit down, overwhelmed not by fear but by the combination of his familiarity and utter strangeness. “Jesus, Stoner,” I said. “Jesus.”
He stood gazing dully down at me. “My sending,” he said, his voice louder and with a pronounced resonance. “Did you get it?”
A chill articulated my spine, but I forced myself to ignore it. “Sending?” I said.
“Yesterday,” he said, “I sent you what I was feeling. What it’s like for me here.”
“How?” I asked, recalling the feeling of emptiness. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s easy, Puleo,” he said. “All you have to do is die, and thoughts…dreams, they’ll flake off you like old paint. But believe me, it’s hardly adequate compensation.” He sat beside me, resting the rifle across his knees. This was no ordinary sequence of movements. His outline wavered, and his limbs appeared to drift apart: I might have been watching the collapse of a lifelike statue through a volume of disturbed water. It took all my self-control to keep from flinging myself away. His image steadied, and he stared at me. “Last person I was this close to ran like hell,” he said. “You always were a tough motherfucker, Puleo. I used to envy you that.”
If I hadn’t believed before that he was Stoner, the way he spoke the word motherfucker would have cinched it for me: it had the stiffness of a practiced vernacular, a mode of expression that he hadn’t mastered. This and his pathetic manner made him seem less menacing. “You were tough, too,” I said glibly.
“I tried to be,” he said. “I tried to copy you guys. But it was an act, a veneer. And when we hit Cam Le, the veneer cracked.”
“You remember…” I broke off because it didn’t feel right, my asking him questions; the idea of translating his blood and bones into a best-seller was no longer acceptable.
“Dying?” His lips thinned. “Oh, yeah. Every detail. You guys were hassling the villagers, and I thought, Christ, they’re going to kill them. I didn’t want to be involved, and…I was so tired, you know, so tired in my head, and I figured if I walked off a little ways, I wouldn’t be part of it. I’d be innocent. So I did. I moved a ways off, and the wails, the shouts, they weren’t real anymore. Then I came to this hut. I’d lost track of what was happening by that time. In my mind I was sure you’d already started shooting, and I said to myself, I’ll show them I’m doing my bit, put a few rounds into this hut. Maybe”—his Adam’s apple worked—“maybe they’ll think I killed somebody. Maybe that’ll satisfy them.”
I looked down at the dirt, troubled by what I now understood to be my complicity in his death, and troubled also by a new understanding of the events surrounding the death. I r
ealized that if anyone else had gotten himself blown up, the rest of us would have flipped out and likely have wasted the villagers. But since it had been Stoner, the explosion had had almost a calming effect: Cam Le had rid us of a nuisance.
Stoner reached out his hand to me. I was too mesmerized by the gesture, which left afterimages in the air, to recoil from it, and I watched horrified as his fingers gripped my upper arm, pressing wrinkles in my shirtsleeve. His touch was light and transmitted a dry coolness, and with it came a sensation of weakness. By all appearances, it was a normal hand, yet I kept expecting it to become translucent and merge with my flesh.
“It’s going to be okay,” said Stoner.
His tone, though bemused, was confident, and I thought I detected a change in his face, but I couldn’t put my finger on what the change was. “Why’s it gonna be okay?” I asked, my voice more frail and ghostly-sounding than his. “It doesn’t seem okay to me.”
“Because you’re part of my process, my circuitry. Understand?”
“No,” I said. I had identified what had changed about him. Whereas a few moments before he had looked real, now he looked more than real, ultrareal; his features had acquired the kind of gloss found in airbrushed photographs, and for a split second his eyes were cored with points of glitter as if reflecting a camera flash…except these points were bluish white, not red. There was a coarseness to his face that hadn’t been previously evident, and in contrast to my earlier perception of him, he now struck me as dangerous, malevolent.
He squinted and cocked his head. “What’s wrong, man? You scared of me?” He gave an amused sniff. “Hang in there, Puleo. Tough guy like you, you’ll make an adjustment.” My feeling of weakness had intensified: it was as if blood or some even more vital essence were trickling out of me. “Come on, Puleo,” he said mockingly. “Ask me some questions? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? I mean this must be the goddamn scoop of the century. Good News From Beyond the Grave! Of course”—he pitched his voice low and sepulchral—“the news isn’t all that good.”
Those glittering cores resurfaced in his pupils, and I wanted to wrench free; but I felt helpless, wholly in his thrall.
“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 fucking 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 coarsened 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, flustered, 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 circumstance: 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 shit-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 bullshit.” 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 goddamn 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. Nobody really gives a shit ’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 shit ’bout it, so shut the fuck up!”
“Be cool,” advised Fierman. “Man’s entitled to his ’pinion.”
I looked at him, saw a flushed, fat face with bloodshot eyes and a stupid reproving frown. “Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck his ’pinion.” I turned back to Witcover. “Whaddya think, man? That there’s this genuine breath of conscience sweepin’ the land? Open your goddamn 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 shits. It was searchin’ in the weeds for your buddy’s arm. It was lookin’ into the snaky eyes of some whore you were bangin’ and feelin’ weird shit 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 crap, and it makes me wanna fuckin’ puke to see what a noble hell it’s turnin’ out to be!”
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