The Human Stain

out to take a shot. In one hand he holds a bottle of whiskey — that's all he appears to have on him. “Look at me!” he shouts. “I'm shit and everybody who looks at me knows I'm shit. Nixon! Nixon! That's who did it to me! That's what did it to me! Nixon sent me to Vietnam!”

Solemn as they are as they pile into the van, each bearing the weight of his remembrances, there is the relief of seeing Les, unlike the guy cracking up on the street, in a state of calm that never before existed for him. Though they are not men given to expressing transcendent sentiments, they feel, in Les's presence, the emotions that can accompany that kind of urge. During the course of the drive home, each of them — except for Les — apprehends to the greatest degree available to him the mystery of being alive and in flux.

He looked serene, but that was a fakeout. He'd made up his mind. Use his vehicle. Take them all out, including himself. Along the river, come right at them, in the same lane, in their lane, round the turn where the river bends.

He's made up his mind. Got nothin' to lose and everything to gain. It isn't a matter of if that happens or if I see this or if I think this I will do it and if I don't I won't. He's made up his mind to the extent that he's no longer thinking. He's on a suicide mission, and inside he is agitated big-time. No words. No thoughts. It's just seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling — it's anger, adrenaline, and it's resignation. We're not in Vietnam. We're beyond Vietnam.

(Taken again in restraints to the Northampton VA a year later, he tries putting into plain English for the psychologist this pure state of something that is nothing. It's all confidential anyway. She's a doc. Medical ethics. Strictly between the two of them. “What were you thinking?” “No thinking.” “You had to be thinking something.” “Nothing.” “At what point did you get in your truck?” “After dark.” “Had you had dinner?” “No dinner.” “Why did you think you were getting into the truck?” “I knew why.” “You knew where you were going.” “To get him.” “To get who?” “The Jew. The Jew professor.” “Why were you going to do that?” “To get him.” “Because you had to?” “Because I had to.” “Why did you have to?” “Kenny.” “You were going to kill him.” “Oh yes. All of us.” “There was planning, then.” “No planning.” “You knew what you were doing.” “Yes.” “But you did not plan it.” “No.” “Did you think you were back in Vietnam?” “No Vietnam.” “Were you having a flashback?” “No flashbacks.” “Did you think you were in the jungle?” “No jungle.” “Did you think you would feel better?” “No feelings.” “Were you thinking about the kids? Was this payback?” “No payback.” “Are you sure?” “No payback.” “This woman, you tell me, killed your children, ‘a blow job,’ you told me, ‘killed my kids’—weren't you trying to get back at her, to take revenge for that?” “No revenge.” “Were you depressed?” “No, no depression.” “You were out to kill two people and yourself and you were not angry?” “No, no more anger.” “Sir, you got in your truck, you knew where they would be, and you drove into their headlights. And you're trying to tell me you weren't trying to kill them.” “I didn't kill them.” “Who killed them?” “They killed themselves.”)

Just driving. That's all he's doing. Planning and not planning. Knowing and not knowing. The other headlights are coming at him, and then they're gone. No collision? Okay, no collision. Once they swerve off the road, he changes lanes and keeps going. He just keeps driving. Next morning, waiting with the road crew to go out for the day, he hears about it at the town garage. The other guys already know.

There's no collision so, though he has some sense of it, he's got no details, and when he gets home from driving and gets out of the truck he's not sure what happened. Big day for him. November the eleventh. Veterans Day. That morning he goes with Louie — that morning he goes to the Wall, that afternoon he comes home from the Wall, that night he goes out to kill everybody. Did he? Can't know because there's no collision, but still quite a day from a therapeutic point of view. Second half being more therapeutic than the first. Achieves a true serenity now. Now Kenny can speak to him. Firing side by side with Kenny, both of them opened up on fully automatic, when Hector, the team leader, gives the screaming order “Get your stuff and let's get out of here!” and suddenly Kenny is dead. Quick as that. Up on some hill. Under attack, pulling back — and Kenny's dead. Can't be. His buddy, another farm boy, same background except from Missouri, they were going to do dairy farming together, guy who as a kid of six watched his father die and as a kid of nine watched his mother die, raised after that by an uncle he loved and was always talking about, a successful dairy farmer with a good-sized spread — 180 milking cows, twelve machines milking six cows a side in the parlor at a time — and Kenny's head is gone and he's dead.

Looks like Les is communicating with his buddy now. Showed Kenny that Kenny's not forgotten. Kenny wanted him to do it, and he did it. Now he knows that whatever he did — even if he's not sure what it was — he did it for Kenny. Even if he did kill someone and he goes to jail, it doesn't matter — it can't matter because he's dead. This was just one last thing to do for Kenny. Squared it with him. Knows everything is now all right with Kenny.

(“I went to the Wall and there was his name and it was silence. Waited and waited and waited. I looked at him, he looked at me. I didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything, and that's the point I knew it wasn't okay with Kenny. That there was more to be done. Didn't know what it was. But he wouldn't have just left me like that. That's why there was no message for me. Because I still had more to do for Kenny. Now? Now it's okay with Kenny. Now he can rest.” “And are you still dead?” “What are you, an asswipe? Oh, I can't talk to you, you asswipe! I did it because I am dead!”)

Next morning, first thing, he hears at the garage that she was with the Jew in a car crash. Everybody figures that she was blowing him and he lost control and they went off the road and through the barrier and over the embankment and front-end-first into the shallows of the river. The Jew lost control of the car.

No, he does not associate this with what happened the night before. He was just out driving, in a different state of mind entirely.

He says, “Yeah? What happened? Who killed her?”

“The Jew killed her. Went off the road.”

“She was probably going down on him.”

“That's what they say.”

That's it. Doesn't feel anything about that either. Still feels nothing. Except his suffering. Why is he suffering so much for what happened to him when she can go on giving blow jobs to old Jews? He's the one who does the suffering, and now she just up and walks away from it all.

Anyway, as he sips his morning coffee at the town garage, looks that way to him.

When everybody gets up to start for the trucks, Les says, “Guess that music won't be coming from that house on Saturday nights anymore.”

Though, as sometimes happens, nobody knows what he's talking about, they laugh anyway, and with that, the workday begins.

If she located herself in western Massachusetts, the ad could be traced back to her by colleagues who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, particularly if she went on to describe her appearance and list her credentials. Yet if she didn't specify her place of residence, she could wind up with not a single response from anyone within a radius of a hundred, two, even three hundred miles. And since in every ad she'd studied in the New York Review, the age given by women exceeded her own by from fifteen to thirty years, how could she go ahead to reveal her correct age — to portray herself correctly altogether — without arousing the suspicion that there was something significant undisclosed by her and wrong with her, a woman claiming to be so young, so attractive, so accomplished who found it necessary to look for a man through a personal ad? If she described herself as “passionate,” this might readily be interpreted by the lascivious-minded to be an intentional provocation, to mean “loose” or worse, and letters would come pouring in to her NYRB box from the men she wanted nothing to do with. But if she appeared to be a bluestocking for whom sex was of decidedly less importance than her academic, scholarly, and intellectual pursuits, she would be sure to encourage a response from a type who would be all too maidenly for someone as excitable as she could be with an erotic counterpart she could trust. If she presented herself as “pretty,” she would be associating herself with a vague catchall category of women, and yet if she described herself, straight out, as “beautiful,” if she dared to be truthful enough to evoke the word that had never seemed extravagant to her lovers — who had called her eblouissante (as in “Eblouissante! Tu as un visage de chat”); dazzling, stunning — or if, for the sake of precision in a text of only thirty or so words, she invoked the resemblance noted by her elders to Leslie Caron who her father always enjoyed making too much of, then anyone other than a megalomaniac might be too intimidated to approach her or refuse to take her seriously as an intellectual. If she wrote, “A photo accompanying the letter would be welcome,” or, simply, “Photo, please,” it