The Comedy is Finished

no longer knew what he wanted to tell the boy, what he wanted to ask, what he’d thought he might accomplish here. (Rescue; it was as simple as that: he’d seen himself as a personification of America, rescuing this strayed lamb, this prodigal son, bringing him back to the safety of American truth.) Looking at the boy now, seeing how foreign Private Bramlett had become—foreign, alien, unearthly, almost unhuman—Koo was abashed, an emotion he rarely felt and had difficulty recognizing. All he understood was that the boy made him uncomfortable, and he struggled against an instinctive sense of dislike.

Hiding that dislike, from himself as much as from the boy, and struggling for a footing in this conversation, Koo fell back on small talk, that inevitable first question to any casually-met GI: “Where you from?”

But the boy had none of the usual answers. “America,” he said, and let it go at that.

“You have to be from somewhere, you can’t—” But then it occurred to Koo (wrongly, he later thought) that the boy might be embarrassed at the reminder of his home and parents, and was evading the question for that reason; so he switched to another standard conversation filler, extending his cigarettes toward the boy, saying, “Smoke?”

“Thank you.” The boy took a cigarette, but at first merely held it between the fingers of both hands, smiling wistfully at it, rolling it back and forth as though to study it from all sides. Glancing almost playfully at Koo, he said, “America has the best cigarettes.”

“America has the best everything,” Koo told him, and extended his Zippo lighter with the logo sketch of himself outlined on its chrome side.

“I used to think that.” The boy puffed, leaning forward over the Zippo flame, having trouble making the cigarette catch fire. His lips and eyelids were trembling; Koo watched them in shock and disgust. He couldn’t help himself, he found the boy unlikeable, unappetizing; like a leper, a child molester. The illness had become the person.

The cigarette finally smoldering, the boy leaned back, the metal chair squeaking under him. “Thank you,” he said.

It was wrong to dislike the boy, wrong and surprising and useless. Before entering the room Koo had felt both curiosity and pity, without that automatic hatred for the Traitor which seemed so inappropriate toward someone who had been brainwashed, who had been subjected to techniques; but in person the boy was physically repellent, grublike, pale and anemic, almost boneless.

Struggling against the revulsion, Koo pushed himself to an exaggerated display of concern, leaning toward the boy, saying, “How’d this happen, son? How’d you get into this?”

The weak smile tinged the boy’s face again: “Well, I saw the truth.”

“You were brainwashed, huh?” Koo was eager to have the boy explained, to excuse his unloveliness. “Wha’d they do to you? Do you want to talk about it?”

Looking troubled, ineffectual, the boy said, “They didn’t do anything to me, they just showed me the truth.” Then, more strongly, more earnestly, he said, “Mr. Davis, I never knew the truth about America before.”

There was no way any longer for Koo completely to hide his dislike; it emerged as impatience. “Oh, come on, boy. Do you think I don’t know the truth about America?”

“No, sir, I don’t think you do.” The boy spoke calmly, not argumentatively, as though stating an obvious fact.

Koo leaned back, looking challengingly at the boy, saying, “Tell me this truth of yours.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy was polite but unflinching, weak but determined. “America’s a rich country,” he said. “The richest country in the world. But we stay rich by exploiting other countries, poor countries. We’re an imperial power, and the thing is, under the present system we don’t have any choice. You see, capitalism requires aggression to maintain itself.”

All of which was said with as much sincerity as though it meant something. Koo, regretting having initiated this interview, impatient to get it done with, no longer even trying to hide his dislike, said, “Don’t gobbledygook at me, boy.”

“It’s not gobbledygook, sir. You see, the capitalist system—”

“And don’t talk to me about capitalist systems. America’s no capitalist system, America’s a democracy.”

“No, sir, I’m sorry, it isn’t.” The smile Koo had thought of as weak now returned to the boy’s face, and Koo saw that it was actually mocking. “What do you think we’re doing here?” the boy asked. “In Korea?”

“Resisting Communist aggression,” Koo snapped. Even while he was saying the words, he knew they were his own form of gobbledygook, stock phrases from government announcements or newspaper editorials, but he couldn’t help himself. “Coming to the assistance,” he went on, “of one of our partner nations in the free world.”

The smile was openly mocking now; or at least it seemed so to Koo. The boy said, “Mr. Davis, you’ve been in Korea a lot. Do you think this is a free country?”

Koo hadn’t thought about it at all, and he didn’t now. He was embarrassed at the banality of the things he’d just said, and he struggled toward another mode of argument, saying, “Son, all of Korea I’ve ever seen is Army bases and helicopters, but I can guarantee you this much: The people of South Korea are a hell of a lot more free than the Communist slaves in North Korea.”

“But that isn’t true.” The boy’s smile had gone again, replaced by his earnest-and-sincere expression. “North Korea is a People’s Republic,” he said, solemnly, as though the words were magic. “The people rule themselves. In South Korea, there’s nothing but a puppet government set up by the Americans. America rules South Korea.”

Koo shook his head, frowning at the wrongness of this boy. He was caught up now simply in the argument, no longer trying to understand or make contact with the boy himself, but only to pursue the difference of opinion. (Another linkage; this was the first time in his life that Koo ever tried to enunciate his political assumptions. Everything did start there, a quarter century ago, in Korea, and nobody even noticed.) Speaking out of his own conviction, but choosing his words as a debater would, for their value in the argument rather than their usefulness in clarifying his thoughts, he said, “Son, you’ve turned everything upside down. The United States isn’t like that. We don’t run any country except our own. Look around you. Who controls every Communist nation in the world? Russia! They’ve just been filling your head with a lot of crap up there.” Then, still wanting somehow to champion the boy despite his unlikeableness, to rescue him if it was at all possible, Koo said, “They starved you, right? And they don’t let you sleep. Then, when they’ve got you worn down, they fill your mind with all this garbage.”

But the boy was suffering some sort of political equivalent of rapture of the deep; he didn’t want to be rescued, he wanted to drown. “Mr. Davis,” he said, with all his pale fervor, “it isn’t like that at all. We had classes, we learned things. We could ask all the questions we wanted. They showed us facts, history, things our own leaders had said.”

“That we run South Korea?”

“That the Western nations, Europe and America, only survive by exploiting the colonial nations.”

His irritation growing, Koo said, “This is utter crap. Let me put you straight, once and for all. America is a rich country, and you know why? Any kid in school can tell you this. One, we’re rich in raw materials, coal and oil and metal and wood and water and whatever we want. Two, we’re a goddamn bright people. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison—Americans invented America. What’ve these Koreans got? What did they ever do for themselves? America is the first and only absolutely free country in the world, even more than England and France and anybody, and all we’re interested in in the world is democracy and freedom. Do you think we fought the Second World War for colonies? What colonies? Americans are idealistic, son, that’s the only reason we’re here. For an ideal. For freedom.”

“I know you believe that, Mr. Davis—”

“Of course I believe it, because it’s true! Every American believes it, for the same reason. What’s the matter with you?”

“American aggression,” the boy said, calm, dogged, hearing nothing, pushing his own parroted lessons into