The Human Stain

It was unusually warm for November, and approaching the Wall they saw that a lot of the guys were in shirtsleeves and some of the women were wearing shorts. People wearing sunglasses in mid-November but otherwise the flowers, the people, the kids, the grandparents —it was exactly as Louie had described. And the Moving Wall was no surprise: he'd seen it in magazines, on T-shirts, got a glimpse on TV once of the real full-sized D.C. Wall before he quickly switched off the set. Stretched the entire length of the macadam parking lot were all those familiar joined panels, a perpendicular cemetery of dark upright slabs sloping off gradually at either end and stamped in white lettering with all the tightly packed names. The name of each of the dead was about a quarter of the length of a man's little finger. That's what it took to get them all in there, 58,209 people who no longer take walks or go to the movies but who manage to exist, for whatever it is worth, as inscriptions on a portable black aluminum wall supported behind by a frame of two-by-fours in a Massachusetts parking lot back of a Ramada Inn.

The first time Swift had been to the Wall he couldn't get out of the bus, and the others had to drag him off and keep dragging until they got him face to face with it, and afterward he had said, "You can hear the Wall crying." The first time Chet had been to the Wall he'd begun to beat on it with his fists and to scream, "That shouldn't be Billy's name—no, Billy, no!—that there should be my name!" The first time Bobcat had been to the Wall he'd just put out his hand to touch it and then, as though the hand were frozen, could not pull it away—had what the VA doctor called some type of fit. The first time Louie had been to the Wall it didn't take him long to figure out what the deal was and get to the point. "Okay, Mikey," he'd said aloud, "here I am. I'm here," and Mikey, speaking in his own voice, had said right back to him, "It's all right, Lou. It's okay."

Les knew all these stories of what could happen the first time, and now he is there for the first time, and he doesn't feel a thing.

Nothing happens. Everyone telling him it's going to be better, you're going to come to terms with it, each time you come back it's going to get better and better until we get you to Washington and you make a tracing at the big wall of Kenny's name, and that, that is going to be the real spiritual healing—this enormous buildup, and nothing happens. Nothing. Swift had heard the Wall crying—Les doesn't hear anything. Doesn't feel anything, doesn't hear anything, doesn't even remember anything. It's like when he saw his two kids dead. This huge lead-in, and nothing. Here he was so afraid he was going to feel too much and he feels nothing, and that is worse. It shows that despite everything, despite Louie and the trips to the Chinese restaurant and the meds and no drinking, he was right all along to believe he was dead. At the Chinese restaurant he felt something, and that temporarily tricked him. But now he knows for sure he's dead because he can't even call up Kenny's memory. He used to be tortured by it, now he can't be connected to it in any way.

Because he's a first-timer, the others are kind of hovering around. They wander off briefly, one at a time, to pay their respects to particular buddies, but there is always someone who stays with him to check him out, and when each guy comes back from being away, he puts an arm around Les and hugs him. They all believe they are right now more attuned to one another than they have ever been before, and they all believe, because Les has the requisite stunned look, that he is having the experience they all wanted him to have. They have no idea that when he turns his gaze up to one of the three American flags flying, along with the black POW/MIA flag, over the parking lot at half-mast, he is not thinking about Kenny or even about Veterans Day but thinking that they are flying all the flags at half-mast in Pittsfield because it has finally been established that Les Farley is dead. It's official: altogether dead and not merely inside. He doesn't tell this to the others. What's the point? The truth is the truth. "Proud of you," Louie whispers to him. "Knew you could do it. I knew this would happen." Swift is saying to him, "If you ever want to talk about it..."

A serenity has overcome him now that they all mistake for some therapeutic achievement. The Wall That Heals—that's what the sign says that's out front of the inn, and that is what it does. Finished with standing in front of Kenny's name, they're walking up and down with Les, the whole length of the Wall and back, all of them watching the folks searching for the names, letting Lester take it all in, letting him know that he is where he is doing what he is doing.