The Human Stain

have been off on my own, deep in the fold of those green hills. I sat on the grass, astonished, unable to account for what I was thinking: he has a secret. This man constructed along the most convincing, believable emotional lines, this force with a history as a force, this benignly wily, smoothly charming, seeming totality of a manly man nonetheless has a gigantic secret. How do I reach this conclusion? Why a secret? Because it is there when he's with her. And when he's not with her it's there too — it's the secret that's his magnetism. It's something not there that beguiles, and it's what's been drawing me all along, the enigmatic it that he holds apart as his and no one else's. He's set himself up like the moon to be only half visible. And I cannot make him fully visible. There is a blank. That's all I can say. They are, together, a pair of blanks. There's a blank in her and, despite his air of being someone firmly established, if need be an obstinate and purposeful opponent — the angry faculty giant who quit rather than take their humiliating crap — somewhere there's a blank in him too, a blotting out, an excision, though of what I can't begin to guess ... can't even know, really, if I am making sense with this hunch or fancifully registering my ignorance of another human being.

Only some three months later, when I learned the secret and began this book — the book he had asked me to write in the first place, but written not necessarily as he wanted it — did I understand the underpinning of the pact between them: he had told her his whole story. Faunia alone knew how Coleman Silk had come about being himself. How do I know she knew? I don't. I couldn't know that either. I can't know. Now that they're dead, nobody can know. For better or worse, I can only do what everyone does who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living. It is my job. It's now all I do.

After Les got out of the VA hospital and hooked up with his support group so as to stay off the booze and not go haywire, the long-range goal set for him by Louie Borrero was for Les to make a pilgrimage to the Wall — if not to the real Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, then to the Moving Wall when it arrived in Pittsfield in November. Washington, D.C., was a city Les had sworn he would never set foot in because of his hatred of the government and, since '92, because of his contempt for that draft dodger sleeping in the White House. To get him to travel all the way down to Washington from Massachusetts was probably asking too much anyway: for someone still fresh from the hospital, there would be too much emotion stretched over too many hours of coming and going on the bus.

The way to prepare Les for the Moving Wall was the same way Louie prepared everybody: start him off in a Chinese restaurant, get Les to go along with another four or five guys for a Chinese dinner, arrange as many trips as it took — two, three, seven, twelve, fifteen if need be — until he was able to last out one complete dinner, to eat all the courses, from soup to dessert, without sweating through his shirt, without trembling so bad he couldn't hold still enough to spoon his soup, without running outside every five minutes to breathe, without ending up vomiting in the bathroom and hiding inside the locked stall, without, of course, losing it completely and going ballistic with the Chinese waiter.

Louie Borrero had his hundred percent service connection, he'd been off drugs and on his meds now for twelve years, and helping veterans, he said, was how he got his therapy. Thirty-odd years on, there were a lot of Vietnam veterans still out there hurting, and so he spent just about all day every day driving around the state in his van, heading up support groups for veterans and their families, finding them doctors, getting them to AA meetings, listening to all sorts of troubles, domestic, psychiatric, financial, advising on VA problems, and trying to get the guys down to Washington to the Wall.

The Wall was Louie's baby. He organized everything: chartered the buses, arranged for the food, with his gift for gentle camaraderie took personal care of the guys terrified they were going to cry too hard or feel too sick or have a heart attack and die. Beforehand they all backed off by saying more or less the same thing: “No way. I can't go to the Wall. I can't go down there and see so-and-so's name. No way. No how. Can't do it.” Les, for one, had told Louie, “I heard about your trip that last time. I heard all about how bad it went. Twenty-five dollars a head for this charter bus. Supposed to include lunch, and the guys all say the lunch was shit — wasn't worth two bucks. And that New York guy didn't want to wait around, the driver. Right, Lou? Wanted to get back early to do a run to Atlantic City? Atlantic City! Fuck that shit, man. Rushin' everything and everybody and then lookin' for a big tip at the end? Not me, Lou. No fuckin' way. If I had to see a couple of guys in tiger suits falling into each other's arms and sobbin', I'd puke.”

But Louie knew what a visit could mean. “Les, it's nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. It's the end of the twentieth century, Lester. It's time you started to face this thing. You can't do it all at once, I know that, and nobody is going to ask you to. But it's time to work your program, buddy. The time has come. We're not gonna start with the Wall. We're gonna start slow. We're gonna start off with a Chinese restaurant.”

But for Les that wasn't starting slow; for Les, just going for the take-out down in Athena, he'd had to wait in the truck while Faunia picked up the food. If he went inside, he'd want to kill the gooks as soon as he saw them. “But they're Chinese,” Faunia told him, “not Vietnamese.” “Asshole! I don't care what the fuck they are! They count as gooks! A gook is a gook!”

As if he hadn't slept badly enough for the last twenty-six years, the week before the visit to the Chinese restaurant he didn't sleep at all. He must have telephoned Louie fifty times telling him he couldn't go, and easily half the calls were placed after 3 A.M. But Louie listened no matter what the hour, let him say everything on his mind, even agreed with him, patiently muttered “Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... uh-huh” right on through, but in the end he always shut him down the same way: “You're going to sit there, Les, as best you can. That's all you have to do. Whatever gets going in you, if it's sadness, if it's anger, whatever it is — the hatred, the rage — we're all going to be there with you, and you're going to try to sit there without running or doing anything.” “But the waiter,” Les would say, “how am I going to deal with the fucking waiter? I can't, Lou — I'll fuckin' lose it!” “I'll deal with the waiter. All you have to do is sit.” To whatever objection Les raised, including the danger that he might kill the waiter, Louie replied that all he'd have to do was sit. As if that was all it took — sitting — to stop a man from killing his worst enemy.

They were five in Louie's van when they went up to Blackwell one evening barely two weeks after Less release from the hospital. There was the mother-father-brother-leader, Louie, a bald guy, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, wearing freshly pressed clothes and his black Vietnam Vet cap and carrying his cane, and, what with his short stature, sloping shoulders, and high paunch, looking a little like a penguin because of the stiff way he walked on his bad legs. Then there were the big guys who never said much: Chet, the thrice-divorced housepainter who'd been a marine — three different wives scared out of their wits by this brute-sized, opaque, pony-tailed lug without any desire ever to speak — and Bobcat, an ex-rifleman who'd lost a foot to a land mine and worked for Midas Muffler. Last, there was an undernourished oddball, a skinny, twitchy asthmatic missing most of his molars, who called himself Swiff, having legally changed his name after his discharge, as though his no longer being Joe Brown or Bill Green or whoever he was when he was drafted would cause him, back home, to leap out of bed every morning with joy. Since Vietnam, Swift's health had been close to destroyed by every variety of skin and respiratory and neurological ailment, and now he was being eaten away by an antagonism toward the Gulf War vets that exceeded even Les's disdain. All the way up to Blackwell, with Les already beginning to shake and feel queasy, Swiff more than made up for the silence of the big guys. That wheezing voice of his would not stop. “Their biggest problem is they can't go to the beach? They get upset at the beach when they see the sand? Shit. Weekend warriors and all of a sudden they have to see some real action. That's why they're pissed off — all in the reserves, never thought they were going to be called up, and then they get called up. And they didn't do dick. They don't know what war is. Call that a war? Four-day ground war? How many gooks did they kill? They're all upset they didn't take out Saddam Hussein. They got one enemy — Saddam Hussein. Gimme a break. There's nothin' wrong with these guys. They just want money without puttin' in the hard time. A rash. You know how many rashes I got from Agent Orange? I'm not goin' to live to see sixty, and these guys are worryin' about a rash!”

The Chinese restaurant sat up at the north edge of Blackwell, on the highway just beyond the boarded-up paper mill and backing onto the river. The concrete-block building was low and long and pink, with a plate-glass window at the front, and half of it was painted to look like brickwork — pink brickwork. Years ago it had been a bowling alley. In the big window, the erratically flickering letters of a neon sign meant to look Chinese spelled out “The Harmony Palace.”

For Les, the sight of that sign was enough to erase the slightest glimmer of hope. He couldn't do it. He'd