The Human Stain

"You want Chet to put some on your plate, or you want to take for yourself, Les?"

"Not hungry."

"That's all right," Louie says, as Chet begins piling things on Les's plate for him. "You don't have to be hungry. That's not the deal."

"This almost over?" Les says. "I gotta get out of here. I'm not kiddin', guys. I really gotta get out of here. Had enough. Can't take it. I feel like I'm gonna lose control. I've had enough. You said I could leave. I gotta get out."

"I don't hear the code word, Les," Louie says, "so we're going to keep going."

Now the shakes have set in big-time. He cannot deal with the rice. It falls off the fork, he's shaking so bad.

And, Christ almighty, here comes a waiter with the water. Circling around and coming at Lester from the back, from out of fucking nowhere, another waiter. They are all at once but a split second away from Les yelling "Yahhh!" and going for the waiter's throat, and the water pitcher exploding at his feet.

"Stop!" cries Louie. "Back off!"

The women shelling the peas start screaming.

"He does not need any water!" Shouting, standing on his feet and shouting, with his cane raised over his head, Louie looks to the women like the one who is nuts. But they don't know what nuts is if they think that Louie's nuts. They have no idea.

At other tables some people are standing, and Henry rushes over and talks to them quietly until they are all sitting down. He has explained that those are Vietnam veterans, and whenever they come around, he takes it as a patriotic duty to be hospitable to them and to put up for an hour or two with their problems.

There is absolute quiet in the restaurant from then on. Les picks at a little food and the others eat up everything until the only food left on the table is the stuff still on Les's plate.

"You done with that?" Bobcat asks him. "You not gonna eat that?"

This time he can't even manage "take it." Say just those two words, and everybody buried beneath that restaurant floor will come rising up to seek revenge. Say one word, and if you weren't there the first time to see what it looked like, you sure as shit will see it now.

Here come the fortune cookies. Usually they love that. Read the fortunes, laugh, drink the tea—who doesn't love that? But Les shouts "Tea leaf!" and takes off, and Louie says to Swift, "Go out with him. Get him, Swiftie. Keep an eye on him. Don't let him out of your sight. We're gonna pay up."

On the way home there is silence: from Bobcat silence because he is laden with food; from Chet silence because he long ago learned through the repetitious punishment of too many brawls that for a man as fucked up as himself, silence is the only way to seem friendly; and from Swift silence too, a bitter and disgruntled silence, because once the flickering neon lights are behind them, so is the memory of himself that he seems to have had at The Harmony Palace.

Swift is now busy stoking the pain.

Les is silent because he is sleeping. After the ten days of solid insomnia that led up to this trip, he is finally out.

It's when everybody else has been dropped off and Les and Louie are alone in the van that Louie hears him coming round and says, "Les? Les? You did good, Lester. I saw you sweatin', I thought, Umm-umm-umm, no way he's gonna make it. You should have seen the color you were. I couldn't believe it. I thought the waiter was finished." Louie, who spent his first nights home handcuffed to a radiator in his sister's garage to assure himself he would not kill the brother-in-law who'd kindly taken him in when he was back from the jungle only forty-eight hours, whose waking hours are so organized around all the others' needs that no demonic urge can possibly squeeze back in, who, over a dozen years of being sober and clean, of working the Twelve Steps and religiously taking his meds—for the anxiety his Klonopin, for the depression his Zoloft, for the sizzling ankles and the gnawing knees and the relentlessly aching hips his Salsalate, an anti-inflammatory that half the tune does little other than to give him a burning stomach, gas, and the shits—has managed to clear away enough debris to be able to talk civilly again to others and to feel, if not at home, then less crazily aggrieved at having to move inefficiently about for the rest of his life on those pain-ridden legs, at having to try to stand tall on a foundation of sand—happy-go-lucky Louie laughs. "I thought he didn't have a chance. But, man," says Louie, "you didn't just make it past the soup, you made it to the fucking fortune cookie. You know how many times it took me to make it to the fortune cookie? Four.