Memory Wire

Too, there was a part of him that didn’t belong to the military creches at Danang, a willfulness for which he had often been chastened. It’s the risk you take, a Khmer geneticist once told him, with this kind of chemical tampering. Aggression bordered on rebellion. He was headstrong. They had told him so at Danang. They had beaten him for it.

He had performed loyally in the Pacific Rim offensives, and he had killed a lot of posseiros, and he could not honestly say it was a moral revulsion that had drawn him away from the military after the war. Maybe that, too, in part. But he guessed his moral sensibilities were as poorly developed as his capacity for fear. What he felt was more personal. Brazil had astonished him. It was huge in every dimension. He had never guessed a single nation could contain so much variety of wealth, poverty, landscape. He sensed a world beyond the narrow margins he had been raised to recognize. He wondered, finally, if there might not be a life for him here, some destiny more subtle than career soldiering in Thailand or the Philippines or in occupied Manchuria. He disappeared during a recreational leave in Sao Paulo a week after the peace was declared. He became an illegal.

As an illegal he had no rights and was constantly vulnerable to arrest, but he had been able to secure a series of lumbering jobs that led him increasingly closer to the frontier and finally, a few years ago, to Pau Seco. The oneirolith mine fascinated him. The scope of the effort fascinated him, the strangeness of it, the wild contrasts of poverty and fortune. If there was a role for him to play, he thought, it was here.

Well. It was a faulty intuition. Unless, of course, this was his role, the unintended role of victim and martyr, and the cautionary role he would play, hanging by the neck on the gallows hill above the old town.

But he did not blame himself and he did not blame the Americans. He had been offered—and briefly possessed—a startling sum of money. From his new perspective it seemed trivial, but that was death-cell thinking: the money might have bought him a new life, and given the decision to make again, he might make it the same way. He had gambled and lost.

Bad calculation, then. But was that all? No.

Something else.

In the years since the war he had developed a loathing for the sort of men who controlled Pau Seco, for Andreazza and his brutal soldiers and for the garimpeiros like Claudio who exploited their laborers. And in the brief time he knew her, he had developed a guarded sympathy for the American woman, Teresa, who was so startlingly guileless she seemed to exist in another universe. It was a moral sensibility as primitive as his fears but, Ng thought, at least as strong. And maybe, at the base of it, that was why he had frustrated his torturers. He had learned how to hate them.

Oberg was a different case. He already hated Oberg. He had hated him for years.

Ng was aware of the pressure of Oberg’s eyes as the guards hustled him into the tiny interrogation room. There were two gray-uniformed peacekeepers in the room as well as the military man Andreazza, but the tension was obvious and direct: it passed between Oberg and Ng.

But I have the advantage, Ng thought. He doesn’t know who I am. But I know all about him.

The guards dropped him into a cruelly straight-backed wooden chair. Ng gasped and almost fainted with the pain. There had been blood in his urine this morning, and he was worried that his injuries might be more serious than he had thought.

Maybe these people had already killed him. Maybe he was only waiting to die.

He took deep, ratcheting breaths until his heart was steady and he was able to hold up his head. A swimming blackness obscured his vision. He looked at Oberg and Oberg seemed to be standing at the end of a tu

Now Oberg was talking.

Oberg said the predictable things. He said he knew all about Ng’s co

He said all this in a restrained, sweetly reasonable voice that reminded Ng of the whine of the hydraulic pumps deep in the mine. He closed his eyes and envisioned Oberg himself as a machine, a whistling construction of pipes and levers and barbed wire and scalding steam. A machine with claws, he thought giddily; iron claws and searchlight eyes.

A guard butted him awake with his rifle.

Oberg was closer now. Oberg was peering into Ng’s face. He was close enough that Ng could smell the American’s sanitized breath, hot and perfumed with mint. And Ng understood suddenly—scrutinizing Oberg from the chair, but aloofly, as if from some higher and cleaner place—that Oberg was a lie. His starched collar was a lie; his slick, receding hair was a lie; the restrained tension ticking at the corner of his mouth betrayed a multitude of lies. Oberg was a lie made of flesh.

“I won’t hurt you,” the American said calmly. “You understand? I’m not here to hurt you.”

And that was a lie too.

“I know you,” Ng whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Oberg said. “I can’t hear you.”

“I know you.”

Oberg frowned.

Ng spoke in spite of himself. A flood of truth into the vacuum of Oberg’s lies. “I know who you are.” He closed his eyes and hoped the guard wouldn’t strike him again. “We marched through Rio Branco,” he said breathlessly. “The villages west of Rio Branco. This was in the spring of ’37, a little after the April offensive. You were famous. Did you know that? Among the Vietnamese, you were notorious.” And Oberg touched him then; Oberg took Ng’s long hair in his hand and jerked his head back against the spine of the chair to make him stop. But Ng kept talking. It was as if he had lost the power to control himself. “We did terrible things. We killed people. Posseiros. Soldiers mostly. Ragged men, but at least they were armed. It would have been so easy to feel guilt. We were machines, you understand, machines made to kill, but it was possible to feel guilt… some of us felt it.”

Oberg cracked Ng’s head against the back of the chair, and Ng was certain he would pass out. Which made him unhappy, because he was enjoying this in some curious way: it was the only act of revenge available to him. But then Andreazza said in his careful English, “We.don’t want to kill him quite yet, Mr. Oberg.” And the American relaxed his grip slightly.

Ng opened his eyes and looked into Oberg’s eyes and understood that the American hated him for what he knew. “We marched out from Rio Branco,” he said, “to clean up after you. Clean up the guerillas, they meant. But you had left another kind of mess.” The memory was vivid, and Ng, lost in it now, became more solemn. “The bodies were everywhere. Women and children. It disgusted us. Even us. It disgusted even us. And in a strange way it made us feel better. We were machines but we weren’t monsters. You proved that to us. You were our consolation. Whatever we had become, there was something worse.” He looked at Oberg and, from the depths of his chair, he smiled. “You made us feel human.”

Oberg whispered between his teeth; the words were inaudible. Ng felt a brief, untethered burst of happiness. It was a kind of victory. “They’ve been gone a long time,” he said. The Americans, he meant. He felt himself drifting out of awareness, but that was all right now. He had said what he wanted to say. “You won’t find them. It’s too late to find them.”

And closed his eyes. And took deep, painful breaths.

Oberg turned to Andreazza. “Kill him,” he said tightly “Kill the slant-eyed son of a bitch.”

“In time,” Andreazza said.