The Human Stain

never make it. He'd lose it completely.

The monotonousness of repeating those words — and yet the force it took for him to surmount the terror. The river of blood he had to wade through to make it by the smiling gook at the door and take his seat at the table. And the horror — a deranging horror against which there was no protection — of the smiling gook handing him a menu. The outright grotesquerie of the gook pouring him a glass of water. Offering him water! The very source of all his suffering could have been that water. That's how crazy it made him feel.

“Okay, Les, you're doin' good. Doin' real good,” said Louie. “Just have to take this one course at a time. Real good so far. Now I want you to deal with your menu. That's all. Just the menu. Just open the menu, open it up, and I want you to focus on the soups. The only thing you have to do now is order your soup. That's all you gotta do. If you can't make up your mind, we'll decide for you. They got mighty good wonton soup here.”

“Fuckin' waiter,” Les said.

“He's not the waiter, Les. His name is Henry. He's the owner. Les, we gotta focus on the soup. Henry, he's here to run his place. To be sure everything is running okay. No more, no less. He doesn't know about all that other stuff. Doesn't know about it, doesn't want to. What about your soup?”

“What are you guys having?” He had said that. Les. In the midst of this desperate drama, he, Les, had managed to stand apart from all the turmoil and ask what they were having to eat.

“Wonton,” they all said.

“All right. Wonton.”

“Okay,” Louie said. “Now we're going to order the other stuff. Do we want to share? Would that be too much, Les, or do you want your own thing? Les, what do you want? You want chicken, vegetables, pork? You want lo mein? With the noodles?”

He tried to see if he could do it again. “What are you guys going to have?”

“Well, Les, some of us are having pork, some of us are having beef—”

“I don't care!” And why he didn't care was because this all was happening on some other planet, this pretending that they were ordering Chinese food. This was not what was really happening.

“Double-sauteed pork? Double-sauteed pork for Les. Okay. All you have to do now, Les, is concentrate and Chet'll pour you some tea. Okay? Okay.”

“Just keep the fucking waiter away.” Because from the corner of his eye he'd spotted some movement.

“Sir, sir—” Louie called to the waiter. “Sir, if you just stay there, we'll come to you with our order. If you wouldn't mind. We'll bring the order to you — you just keep a distance.” But the waiter seemed not to understand, and when he again started toward them, clumsily but quickly Louie rose up on his bad legs. “Sir! We'll bring the order to you. To. You. Right? Right,” Louie said, sitting back down again. “Good,” he said, “good,” nodding at the waiter, who stood stock-still some ten feet away. “That's it, sir. That's perfect.”

The Harmony Palace was a dark place with fake plants scattered along the walls and maybe as many as fifty tables spaced in rows down the length of the long dining room. Only a few of them were occupied, and all of those far enough away so that none of the other customers seemed to have noticed the brief disturbance up at the end where the five men were eating. As a precaution, Louie always made certain, coming in, to get Henry to place his party at a table apart from everyone else. He and Henry had been through this before.

“Okay, Les, we got it under control. You can let go of the menu now. Les, let go of the menu. First with your right hand. Now your left hand. There. Chet'll fold it up for you.”

The big guys, Chet and Bobcat, had been seated to either side of Les. They were assigned by Louie to be the evening's MPs and knew what to do if Les made a wrong move. Swiff sat at the other side of the round table, next to Louie, who directly faced Les, and now, in the helpful tones a father might use with a son he was teaching to ride a bike, Swiff said to Les, “I remember the first time I came here. I thought I'd never make it through. You're doin' real good. My first time, I couldn't even read the menu. The letters, they all were swimmin' at me. I thought I was goin' to bust through the window. Two guys, they had to take me out 'cause I couldn't sit still. You're doin' a good job, Les.” If Les had been able to notice anything other than how much his hands were now trembling, he would have realized that he'd never before seen Swiff not twitching. Swiff neither twitching nor bitching. That was why Louie had brought him along — because helping somebody through the Chinese meal seemed to be the thing that Swift did best in this world. Here at The Harmony Palace, as nowhere else, Swiff seemed for a while to remember what was what. Here one had only the faintest sense of him as someone crawling through life on his hands and knees. Here, made manifest in this embittered, ailing remnant of a man was a tiny, tattered piece of what had once been courage. “You're doin' a good job, Les. You're doin' all right. You just have to have a little tea,” Swift suggested. “Let Chet pour some tea.”

“Breathe,” Louie said. “That's it. Breathe, Les. If you can't make it after the soup, we'll go. But you have to make it through the first course. If you can't make it through the double-sauteed pork, that's okay. But you have to make it through the soup. Let's make a code word if you have to get out. A code word that you can give me when there's just no two ways about it. How about 'tea leaf for the code word? That's all you have to say and we're out of here. Tea leaf. If you need it, there it is. But only if you need it.”

The waiter was poised at a little distance holding the tray with their five bowls of soup. Chet and Bobcat hopped right up and got the soup and brought it to the table.

Now Les just wants to say “tea leaf” and get the fuck out. Why doesn't he? I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here.

By repeating to himself “I gotta get out of here,” he is able to put himself into a trance and, even without any appetite, to begin to eat his soup. To take down a little of the broth. “I gotta get out of here,” and this blocks out the waiter and it blocks out the owner but it does not block out the two women at a wall-side table who are opening pea pods and dropping the shelled peas into a cooking pot. Thirty feet away, and Les can pick up the scent of whatever's the brand of cheap toilet water that they've sprayed behind their four gook ears — it's as pungent to him as the smell of raw earth. With the same phenomenal lifesaving powers that enabled him to detect the unwashed odor of a soundless sniper in the black thickness of a Vietnam jungle, he smells the women and begins to lose it. No one told him there were going to be women here doing that. How long are they going to be doing that? Two young women. Gooks. Why are they sitting there doing that? “I gotta get out of here.” But he cannot move because he cannot divert his attention from the women.

“Why are those women doing that?” Les asks Louie. “Why don't they stop doing that? Do they have to keep doing that? Are they gonna keep doing that all night long? Are they gonna keep doing that over and over? Is there a reason? Can somebody tell me the reason? Make them stop doing that.”

“Cool it,” Louie says.

“I am cool. I just wanna know — are they gonna keep doing that? Can anyone stop them? Is there nobody who can think of a way?” His voice rising now, and no easier to stop that happening than to stop those women.

“Les, we're in a restaurant. In a restaurant they prepare beans.”

“Peas,” Les says. “Those are peas!”

“Les, you got your soup and you got your next course coming. The next course: that's the whole world right now. That's everything. That's it. All you got to do next is eat some double-sauteed pork, and that's it.”

“I had enough soup.”

“Yeah?” Bobcat says. “You're not going to eat that? You done with that?”

Besieged on all sides by the disaster to come — how long can the agony be transformed into eating?—Les manages, beneath his breath, to say “Take it.”

And that's when the waiter makes his move — purportedly going for the empty plates.

“No!” roars Les, and Louie is on his feet again, and now, looking like the lion tamer in the circus — and with Les taut and ready for the waiter to attack — Louie points the waiter back with his cane.

“You stay there,” Louie says to the waiter. “Stay there. We bring the empty plates to you. You don't come to us.”

The women shelling the peas have stopped, and without Les's even getting up and going over and showing them how to stop.

And Henry is in on it now, that's clear. This rangy, thin, smiling Henry, a young guy in jeans and a loud shirt and running shoes who poured the water and is the owner, is staring at Les from the door. Smiling but staring. That man is a menace. He is blocking the exit. Henry has got to go.