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I brought you something, Korzenewski announces from the doorway. He carries in a battered green suitcase and lays it flat on the table. An old phonograph. They weren’t using it in the staff room. Apparently one of the officers imported a whole hi-fi system from California. It’s too quiet in here, I think. Time for you to hear a little something besides your own thoughts. You like any special kind of music?

Jazz, he says. His pulse flutters in his neck at the idea of it. Charlie Parker. Mingus. Dexter Gordon. The names stick on his tongue, like spells, an invocation in some language only used for prayer. What’ve you got?

The doctor clucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. I was afraid you’d say that, he says. The pickings are a little slim. From a hidden pocket in the lid of the phonograph he removes a sheaf of dusty tattered LPs and flips through them with a skeptical look. Tchaikovsky, he says. Schubert. Verdi arias. Someone liked the old heavy stuff. Highlights from Lohengrin. Beethoven’s Ninth.

Sorry. I’d rather not.

I don’t blame you. Like going on a reducing diet and then having nothing but osso bucco and burgundy. Ah. Here’s something, though. The Bach cello suites, Pablo Casals. That’s more your speed. And this! He tosses an ancient-looking ten-inch record onto the bed at Phillip’s feet. That’s quite a find.

The record cover, half torn away, is a blurred reproduction of an El Greco painting of Christ on the cross. Missa Papae Marcelli / Incipit Lamentatio Ierimiae Prophetae / di Giovanni Palestrina.

It’s church music. Polyphony. Wonderful for solitude. I listened to it all the time in graduate school, writing my thesis. Palestrina and Bach, the Catholic and the Protestant. Somewhere between those two is the key to all wisdom. I used to go around at cocktail parties claiming that Western civilization reached its climax in the early seventeenth century. But then, of course, in the seventeenth century one would have had to choose between them.

And the price of the wrong decision might be your head.

Right. Only now do we have the luxury of ambivalence. You could say that’s our consolation prize.

He gathers up the rest of the records and folds them under his arm.

Play it as loud as you like, he says. No one minds. Might help you sleep, too.

Thanks, he says. You didn’t have to.

No, it’s part of the job.

I’ll listen to the Palestrina right now.

Then good night.

He removes the record carefully from the crumbling brown sleeve, dusts it, blows away the lint, inspects the surface for scratches. Hands trembling, he tilts it vertically, and stares at his reflection. Through a glass darkly indeed, he thinks. A face appearing in a pool of oil, or ink.

When did he get these cheekbones, he wonders, that jut out like knobs, that make dark pits of his eyesockets and a sharp descending V of his chin. They’ve shaved off the beard and clipped his hair short, shorter than a crew-cut. A skull cut. He runs his fingers along indentations above his ears he’s never seen before. Everywhere the skin feels taut and unnaturally dry.

Can it be? He tilts his makeshift mirror to one side and peers closely at the black hair disappearing at his temples. It doesn’t disappear. It turns silver. Fucking christ, he says out loud, and begins to laugh. What would Mary say? She would say, mashing her lips together in suppressed pride, your father went grey when he was your age.

The heavy knob of the phonograph arm, the faint whine of the belt turning underneath. He holds it with his left arm, lying on his back, propping his head up with the other hand. It settles into the groove with a low hiss.

One voice begins, holding a single note, descending; then a small group of voices, holding a minor chord. The music wavers and turns on itself and resolves. Silence. A larger group, now, all at once. The chords bulge with basses and baritones. A melody begins, up high, met with a triad, four equal parts holding the notes, adding trills, a kite-melody. And then an immense choir cuts in at the other end of the scale, a great trampoline of a sound, almost drowning out the high voices, absorbing them, dragging them to earth. It continues this way. Each phrase lifted up, modulated, embraced, buried, and sealed, just as another begins. It comes in waves, he thinks, it rides its own echo. Music designed for the sonic properties of the cathedral. No one voice at the front, no soloist, no distinctive timbre, no vibrato. Were they not individuals, he thinks, when this music was written, when the pages first passed from hand to hand in the choir loft. Did not any one of them take pride in the particular richness of his own voice, did they not sing in the bath, did they never listen to themselves, alone?

His eyes are wet.

I’m losing my mind, he thinks. I’m disassociating. The music is part of it; it wasn’t happenstance, it’s all part of the plan. It dissolves the individual will. No wonder the Quakers dispensed with it. A harmony scorching every dark crevice of the soul. A harmony that blots out the words, that blots out words, period. Impossible to track; impossible to locate oneself; impossible for it to ever end, even when it does end. He ought to turn it off, but not now, not with the squeak and scratch of the needle coming off in the middle of a bar. Let the side play out, he thinks, and if they’re listening they’ll never know my reaction.

*

Later, in a dream, the Commander appears, crosslegged on a brocade cushion in Shenkman’s living room. In the background Bob Dylan is singing: Corrina, Corrina, darkest nights I’ve ever seen. He smokes opium out of a white clay pipe and gazes at Phillip with a faint smile.

The truth! Phillip says. You belong to me. I knew you. I touched you.

I have not betrayed you.

Then what? You call this fidelity?

No one believes anything they can’t see with their own eyes.

No, he says. That’s not right. We did. That was our secret. We were remaking the world. It worked, for a second. At least I think it did.

We’re only shadows, the Commander says, and this life is a play of shadows. Accustom yourself to that. It’s all part of the greater design.

Don’t play the mystic with me, he says. I know you too well. You would never stand for such nonsense. 

Then put it this way. We existed once, in a certain version of ourselves. A limited edition. We existed within a certain kind of privacy.

It wasn’t just that. If you put it that way, it’s the same as a dream. It’s useless.

You mistake yourself as something other than a vessel, the Commander says. Put in a certain place for someone else’s purpose. You have to become a vessel again.

Spoken by the man who put a rifle in my hand, he says. Who made me a murderer.

Who made you a survivor.

Yes, but a purposeless survivor, a survivor without a story.

Then be that, the Commander says. Be without a story. You’ll find it’s easier.

Someone has pressed a cold compress to his face, a wet and musty wad of cloth. He feels wakefulness nipping at his eyelids, the chattering of a helicopter in the lunar predawn light. No, he says. Not you too. I won’t take it from you. 

Disown yourself, the Commander says. Do you understand what I mean? Disobey all your impulses. That’s the only way forward.

It worked, he says. It worked! And he opens his blurred eyes.

*

Today, Korzenewski says, sitting sideways at the table and crossing his legs nonchalantly, today, we’re going to read the paper. Or, rather, I’m going to read it to you. It’s standard practice. Rather than asking you to absorb it by yourself all at once. One article at a time, one theme at a time. He unfolds a copy of the New York Times on his lap and slides his glasses down to the tip of his nose. Are you ready? I won’t stop, you know, unless you want me to. I’ll be as faithful as a tape recorder.

I’ve been thinking about what you said last time.

Yes?

About making a simple decision.

I’m glad to hear that. It’s still a process, though. A working-through. Let’s do a little of this and then see how you feel.

I don’t understand. If it’s a decision—

Not only your decision. We have to arrive at it together. At the appropriate time.

He begins to laugh.

I’m sorry, he says. It’s just beginning to sound a little like The Magic Mountain. A treatment no one understands for a disease with no observable symptoms. Don’t you ever feel like a bit of a witch doctor, Korzenewski? Peddling this crap?

Well, I have to disagree with that assessment, the doctor says. Red tubercular blotches have sprouted on his cheeks; he takes off his glasses and wipes them awkwardly on the cuff of his jacket. I’m not sure what crap you mean, exactly. It’s nothing so abtruse or hard to follow. Is there something you would like me to explain again?

Yes. He feels a little drunk, a little slow, unable to keep a steady gaze. Certainly.  Explain how you can cure someone with isolation sickness by keeping them isolated. It isn’t a process of acclimation. In all this time I’ve seen exactly three people. Let me talk to someone I know, for Christ’s sake.

Who would you like to talk to?

Shenkman, he says, without hesitation. Rodney Shenkman. He’s with AID in Vientiane. He could be here in two hours.

Rodney Shenkman is in the field, in Savannakhet. He’ll be back in two weeks.

Then my mother. You have telephones, don’t you?

Your mother, Korzenewski says, refuses to answer our phone calls. She claims the line is bugged and the FBI is on her trail. She won’t allow anyone in uniform in the house. We’ve gone to great efforts to establish contact. No luck.

But if she heard my voice—

If she heard your voice she’d think it was a trap.

True, he thinks, she would, and she’d be right not to answer, not to incriminate herself by appearing on a government tape. It would be humiliating, on the day when this all comes out, when the archives are opened, to have it revealed that Mary Ostenbrook collaborated in her son’s interrogation, programming, deprogramming, whatever it might one day be called. It would not be worth that risk. There is no possible gesture toward sanity within a closed system, she would say, you just have to give yourself up to it, and come out the other end, and turn around and batter the door that has just closed behind you.

Let’s forget the question of today. Take it for granted that you will return home, with no interference. Move forward fifteen years. You’ll be forty-two. You’ll have a good job, good credentials. A lawyer, let’s say. A public defender. Imagine you live in Chicago, on the North Side. You’ve got a modest house, a car, you’re married, a wonderful woman, two smart kids. It’s 1983. The war’s been over for ages and ages. Your kids have no memory of it.

I don’t like this line of questioning.

Bear with me. Say you’ve got a son, call him Michael. He’s eight, nine years old. An inquisitive age. He has a school assignment to write about The Vietnam War.

Korzenewski, he says, this is the corniest, most idiotic load of bull.

Laugh all you want. But if you don’t think it’ll happen you’re living in a fog. Explain it to yourself! That’s all I’m asking. Don’t hold it all in. Those four months are a blank goddamned slate as far as the rest of the world is concerned. You can create your own reality. I’m not asking you to fantasize, understand. I’m asking you to connect the dots.

This is it, he thinks, the most terrifying thing of all, the intellectual turned robot, the hip True Believer.

OK, he says. You win. Write it down somewhere, will you? I agree with you. They brainwashed me. There’s no other explanation, is there? You explained the facts to me. I’ll never understand it fully, I guess, but OK. Like you said. The brain recovers. I feel reassured already. Just get me on a plane, would you? I’ll kiss the tarmac. I’ll go have a hamburger and french fries. I can’t wait. It’s making me hungry already.

Korzenewski looks down at the newspaper unfolded on his knees, flicking his eyes across the lead article, as if reviewing his notes. Which is what it could be, Phillip thinks, fighting the urge to slide down off the bed and grab the paper away. It could a special propagandized version, the Southeast Asia version; it could be nonsense, it could be columns filled with random letters and numbers, just to torment me. He feels his bowels loosening. Dimly he remembers shivering with sickness, not long ago, squatting in the bushes, half-naked, scrabbling for leaves with which to wipe himself. This is what paranoia feels like, then: an emptying, a hollowing out, a rendering of oneless gutless, literally, unable to swallow, unable to take anything in.

Are you finished? Korzenewski says. I think you’re mentally auditioning actors for the movie version of your life story. Who’ll play me, do you think? Vincent Price, Tony Perkins? You have to find quite the right level of sinister.

So tell me, he says, go ahead and tell me that the government has no interest in my recovery, in what I say when I’m released. If I’m released.

The government? I think you have a somewhat exaggerated sense of what the word means. Presumably someone somewhere wishes you had useful information to offer. But you don’t. You’ve been shocked, you’ve been traumatized. The Vietnamese tried to do something to you. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it. The government, as you say, is treating you with kid gloves, yes. Because you’re a sensitive case on any number of levels. You yourself have made that clear. No one’s interest is served by sending you back out into society under a cloud of suspicion that you were a spy. People will want to write books about you. You could get hauled before Congress under unpleasant auspices. It would be a disaster for the peace movement, and a disaster for your mother, in particular. People would say she put you up to it, somehow. That isn’t the life you want. I’ve read your file, Phillip. You never aimed for that kind of notoriety. And you’re so young. Of course, it never feels that way. But I look at you and I feel dreadfully afraid. You never asked for this to happen, after all. And you didn’t deserve it.

Doctor, he says, don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want your pity. Or deserve it, for that matter.

The most important thing is that you have time, Korzenewski says. No one’s rushing you here. No one but you. After this the world comes flooding back in, and you’ll wish you could step back and take a moment to think things over.

I think I’ll have to take my chances.

*

A loud clacking disturbs his sleep: some large object, something metal, banging as it rolls down the hallway. Footsteps, low voices. A crowd is assembling, he thinks, elated, they’ll bear me away in a wheelchair. At last, at goddamned last. A knock.

Come in.

Mr. Ostenbrook, the blond orderly says, entering, just stay calm. There’s nothing to be alarmed about. There are two more of them, tall men in white shirts, one black, one olive-skinned, and they come toward the bed like a phalanx. Stay calm, the blond one says again, without meaning it, an ineffectual phrase, he thinks, what you say when staying calm is the last thing you want to do, and the three of them grasp him all at once by the biceps and ankles and turn him around in the bed like a child, like a doll, tangling the sheet around his waist. Now the bed has rails attached, now it tilts up at his feet. He shouts, Hey! Hey!, and they flip him onto his back and an additional pair of hands comes from behind and inserts a soft plastic disc in his mouth, just far enough so that he won’t gag, and he slithers his right hand out and reaches over his head and grabs something, a collar, a lapel, and yanks it forward. A human neck, a human throat. He puts his fingers on the spine and presses his thumb against the windpipe.

Son of a bitch!

His wrists are bound to the rails with white straps, his ankles trussed in some way he can’t see. Like one of those terrible movies in the dim light so you can hardly make out what’s going on. He thrashes like a fish until his muscles are exhausted. Put a blindfold on me at least, he thinks, make it complete, make me a piece of raw meat, make me a sample of flesh for your files.

Phillip, Dr. Korzenewski is saying, to the back and to the left. It’s all right. It’ll be over before you know it. We’re going to give you something to calm down. And I see you’ve been playing the Palestrina. Maybe that will help.

The music comes on again now, the same side. He lifts his head and sees a flash of a needle, a long syringe. The richness of it, the thickness of the chords twining together like strands in a rope, like a perfect, endless knot. It makes him feel as if he is about to gag. And if I do, he thinks, I’ll choke on it, they won’t roll me over in time, it’ll be an easy way out for them, an unexplained illness. Someone is spreading cold jelly on his forehead. A pair of bony hands pink at the joints. He would bite at them if he could. Cold transparent jelly on a Q-tip, in two circles at the temples.

Phillip, Korzenewski speaking again. Let me explain why this is happening. There’s no reason to be concerned. It’s a well-documented medical procedure with excellent chances of success. I ordered it because you are suffering from a severe irreversible depression that has progressed into mania, triggered by your confinement.

No, he roars, though his mouth can’t shape the sound, and jerks against the bindings again. There are wires attached to shiny round discs hovering above his eyes, then fitted to his forehead, attached, somehow, to the jellied circles, as if it was glue. He twists his head from side to side helplessly.

You have to understand that you’ll feel better. Have faith in that. The discomfort is momentary by comparison. You’re a rational man, Phillip. You’ll thank me for doing this.

The room is darkening, as if someone has rolled a heavy shade over the window. Again he tries to raise his head, but the muscles have gone slack; his body, losing all tension, sinks into the mattress, like a bag of bones and tendons, he thinks, like a melting block of ice. He is lying in a canoe on a lake in the fog, and the shock rolls over him like a wave; the canoe takes the brunt of it, nearly pitching over, then righting itself. His head lolls from one side to the other. A thread of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth. He is staring up at the sky, at Ursa Minor, at the Summer Triangle, at Cassiopeia. The fog is beginning to lift. He is staring at the striations of the Milky Way itself, like combed wool. A single woman’s voice begins to sing: peccatum peccavit propterea instabilis facta est omnes qui glorificabant eam spreverunt illam. He hears every syllable clearly, he repeats them silently, the long glorious words finding shape on his tongue. They have a meaning, but an untranslatable meaning, a significance in the perfect world he can see but not enter.

*

And the next morning he half-wakes, dully, with a solid monkey’s fist of pain between his eyes. The bed is the bed he has known, and he sleeps in it the right way up, with no rails, no straps. His mouth still has the terrible dry taste of the rubber and his right arm is bandaged at the elbow. Something happened to me, he thinks. He has a vague memory, a gauzy fragment of a dream, in which the room was filled with horses stamping their hooves. His thoughts seem to spiral towards a point of incandescent pain, but the source of the pain, the injury, he can’t remember, he can’t locate anywhere on his body. His ankle is the same as before. His neck is slightly stiff. Whiplash, he thinks, I was in a wreck, I wrecked the Beetle. But it seems to have been years since he last saw the Beetle. I traveled somewhere, he thinks, a long flight, I had a room with a net, then no room at all. I lost my passport. I was speaking French, but not in France. Where, then. He is thinking of the map tacked to the classroom wall in fifth grade, a map made in the nineteen-thirties, with the English possessions in red and the French in blue. Beirut, Casablanca, Bamako, Brazzaville, Cairo, Pondicherry, Saigon. If I learn French, I can travel to them all, he thought, speaking one language. Men with turbans, men with fezzes, men wearing djellaba and burnus, he swore he would see them all, in the new world, the world Secretary Hammarskjold talked about, the world of harmony among the peoples and the nations. He wouldn’t practice the air-raid drills, he wouldn’t put his head under his desk, he would say, my mother told me not to, my mother said it’s all a lie. He would be sent to Principal Arnstrom’s office, he would be sentenced to a year’s detention, he would be sent to reform school, and cry out, as they took him away, as they forced him to out his desk, I am a political prisoner, I believe in freedom, I support universal disarmament, I am a citizen of the world, my allegiance is not to one nation but to the brotherhood of mankind.

The room remains dark, it has a sallow, jaundiced color, like a smoker’s teeth, like the sky before a thunderstorm, as if he’s put on yellow-tinted lenses, as if they’ve discovered a way to filter out all the brightness in the sun. His stomach is growling. He balls himself up on the bed, grasping his knees, forcing himself into an upright position. You have to wake up, he keeps thinking, though he is awake, isn’t he? He pinches himself on the cheek to make sure. You have to be more awake than awake. You have to see the difference between waking and dreaming. Peccatum peccavit propterea instabilis facta est, that’s what it means, it means, come with me, come into the true sunlight, come out of all your dark places, meet me in the clearing, meet me in paradise.

He pounds on the wall with his palm.

Help! he bellows. I’m alive in here! Somebody help me!

*

Here, drink this, Shenkman shouts in his ear. They are driving along a rutted highway at an unsafe clip at dusk, bouncing halfway out of their seats at every pothole. Without taking his eyes off the road Shenkman reaches into his backpack, wedged between the seats, and tosses a canteen into Phillip’s lap.

It’s Tang, he shouts. Drink all of it. You need the vitamins. I tried to get some mangoes but they’re out of season in Thailand, apparently. In the Talat Sao they’re selling them by the truckload.

Phillip unscrews the top and takes a sip just as Shenkman swerves to avoid a crater, sloshing it all over the front of his shirt.

Thanks, he shouts. Tastes good.

It better.

I didn’t have time to pack much food. I’ve got a box of Ritz Crackers and a can of tuna and that’s about it. We can stop if there’s a stand by the roadside. Otherwise we’ll have to wait till Nom Saraya.

The air flowing over the windshield and across his face is night air: damp and cool, purged of dust, smelling of some sweet pink flower that grows everywhere in vines along the road. He has a flashlight in his lap and an Air Force survey map with the roads marked in English and Thai. There’s a town, Shenkman told him, fifteen miles distant, where they’ll have to stop overnight, buy gas, exchange dollars for baht. Bangkok is nearly four hundred miles away. A week if we’re lucky, he said, two if not. It’s still the dry season. The roads aren’t good, but they’re there, at least.

Stop the car, he wants to say, every few minutes, but restrains himself. They have to keep going; the Jeep has one working headlight. But the need to walk is so strong he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth to stop from saying the words. When they wheeled him out into the corridor, to the desk where the guards were waiting, Shenkman was there, in disguise, in pressed khakis and a white shirt, and he bent down and lifted him to his feet, draping one arm across his shoulders. Someone get this man a cane, he shouted, I refuse to sign the release until he’s issued a cane. And a nurse, a female nurse, he’d never seen one, never imagined there were women there, came hurrying with one. Their faces, even the guards’ faces, were pale and still; they looked at him as if he had three eyes, as if he’d just sprung out of the ground. Sir, one of the guards said to Shenkman, you can’t sign a release for him, he was never here, he’s not in the patient registry. They hobbled together through the double doors, Shenkman still holding him up. The cane was too long. A mile down the road Shenkman stopped at a mechanic’s shop and paid him a dollar to saw three inches off. The mechanic’s children came and stared at him, the pale American with the wilted leg, sitting in the passenger seat and breathing as if he’d never breathed before, as if the idea of breathing had just occurred to him./p>

We’re fugitives, he shouts. It seems to him that there has never been a more beautiful word. You don’t think they’ll come looking for us?

Hell no, Shenkman says. Are you out of your mind? It’s fucking chaos back there. That’s how I was able to get you out. Everyone’s being reassigned because of Tet.

Because of what?

Vietnam’s blown up. The war’s over. We’ll be out in a year, mark my words.

It seems to him that he should be able to conjure up an image to go with the word Vietnam. But he can’t. There was something, once, about the gap between two fingers, or was it two shoulders, or two men, standing shoulder to shoulder? He remembers an outstretched hand pointing, palm down, and a voice saying, C’est vraiment etroite, ce passage. It takes him a moment to find the English words. A narrow passage, a truly narrow passage. But he never went that way, or did he? Maybe it doesn’t really matter. There is the doctor’s bearded face, he is saying something, but his mouth is a void, a perfectly round hole, like a door with the lock and cylinder removed. You can peer through it and see the white wall behind him. God help me, he thinks, I’ve fallen into a German Expressionist movie. Every face a mask, every memory a crudely painted backdrop. But even that doesn’t quite describe it. I can search around, I can probe, I can guess. But a guess is not verifiable. A guess is not the same as saying, this is what I witnessed.

Korzenewski, he thinks, you won, didn’t you? Not by taking memories away, but by making them malleable, making them plastic. He tastes something burnt and sour-sweet, like tamarind candy. Where did he have them, last, those hard brown lozenges wrapped in gold foil? In the Embassy lobby, in the street markets? In the giddiness of escape he hasn’t noticed how little he still knows.

Shenkman, he says, when we get to Bangkok—

I’m taking you straight to the airport. You’re still a hot commodity, you know. No one’s laying a hand on you before you get onto that plane. I’ll get on with you if I have to.

I was going to say I could use a day or two.

To do what? He screws his face into a wry smile. Your last chance for some Southeast Asian R and R?

Just a chance to decompress, I think. To make some decisions.

For fuck’s sake, Shenkman says, don’t make any of those in your current state. Get back to California and check into a nice hotel and order from room service for a few days. You need money? I’ll find a way to get you money. There are Movement people everywhere now. It’s not like it was when you left, believe me. Everything’s aboveground now. The country’s in revolt.

Canada, he thinks, or Australia. New Zealand. Switzerland. Sweden. Anywhere but there. But the names dry up on his tongue and flutter away like flakes of ash. A corpse in a flightsuit, face down in the tall grass, its purple hands swollen and split across the palms, white bones and pink meat exposed. Katherine asleep on her rented bed, naked, half-turned away from him, the sheet tangled around her ankles. What thou lovest well remains, he thinks, peccatum peccavit propterea instabilis facta est omnes qui glorificabant eam spreverunt illam. I’m going to find out what it means. He tries to imagine what it will feel like to take flight again, to be borne up away from the bloodied earth, with the momentary dream, that American wish, quickly over as the click of a fingernail, to ascend, to never set down again.

© 2009 Jess Row