The Human Stain

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 Les's 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, ponytailed lug without any desire ever to speak—and Bobcat, an exrifleman 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 Swift, 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, Swift 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 never make it. He'd lose it completely.