The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Page 23

  “I can neither confirm nor deny,” Poumakis said.

  We sat there for a second and no one said anything. Poumakis took a breath through his nose. He might have resumed talking for no other reason but to fill the silence.

  “The first mode of cover they teach in training,” he said, “the one that’s most typical in the field, is called You Me Same Same. I don’t know where the name came from. I think it’s probably African or Caribbean, but some people think it’s from this Vietnam movie from the ’80s. There’s this Vietnamese girl, and she’s really hot and she’s Viet Cong, and they’ve got her captured. And you’re like, Are they going to rape her? And she points to her eyes, and she points at the eyes of an American, you know, his white eyes, and goes, ‘You, me, same, same.’”

  We all looked at one another and pointed at one another’s eyes. “You, me, same, same,” we said, making come-hither faces.

  Poumakis looked amused. We waited, rapt.

  “If you’re doing You Me Same Same,” he said, “the first objective is to research the target’s passions and interests. The second is to persuade the target that you’re like her, only more confident, nicer. Which is all she has ever wanted in a lover or a friend. It’s like dating.”

  Glines was grinning like a fool, like a shit-eater. He was grinning like a guy who’s just asked his high-school sweetheart to marry him over the Jumbotron at Fenway and she’s moaning, yes, yes, yes. I felt it too. I felt like my life had been a dream in which nothing mattered, and finally I was waking up into a world that was real, a world where people fought. It was really true that I was alive.

  “So who would do that?” Glines asked Poumakis, his voice shaky with joy. “The CIA?”

  “An agent who’s doing You Me Same Same is usually conventional military granted temporary status as intelligence,” Poumakis said. “CIA guys tend to take advantage of how everything kind of loosened up after 9/11 by farming out the fieldwork to us. The CIA is good at intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and planning paramilitary operations. But not when it comes to doing the actual ops. We’re better at fieldwork than they are. It’s there in the statistics. So what are we going to do? Tell them, like, ‘Fuck off, I signed up for the Navy?’”

  We were all nodding as if we related. We needed some way to express our exhilaration, and nodding was the available vehicle. But of the six of us, only Glines was so high on Poumakis that he could overcome his shyness of Poumakis, and ask him what we all wanted to ask.

  “You’ve done that?” asked Glines. “Ops? You Me Same Same?”

  Poumakis drew a vaporizer from a pocket of his sweatpants and puffed. The smoke was scentless, pleasant when it hit my cheek, like the breath of a girl. “My first target was in Sudan. He loved the Canadian Brass. He was obsessed with these two albums, Bach: The Art of Fugue and Live in Germany. I bought them on old-school cassette from a University of Khartoum student at the Agriculture and Veterinary campus in Shambat. I sat in my apartment and listened to them for hours.

  “I bought a new wallet, which was tan, not black like my real one. I bought a Paul Smith suit with subtle stripes and vintage Nike sneakers because my research indicated my target thought that those things were cool. I rented an apartment and got the kind of furniture he would’ve bought.”

  “So you knew you were going to get him to come to your apartment?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I knew that it might happen, but I didn’t want it to. It’s something they teach you to do, getting the furniture, so that you feel like a different person. And you need everything you can get that will make you feel like it will work, because you’re not an actor, and here you are acting.”

  “It’s all in the preparation and training,” I said. I wanted to be the nuts-and-bolts guy, who didn’t glamorize, so that Poumakis would pull me aside and say, “You seem like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, have you ever thought about intelligence work?”

  Poumakis didn’t acknowledge what I’d said. “When I hung out with this guy, in my striped suit—we went to this cafe on Nile Street—I was worried I would spill my glass of tea down my suit because I was faking. I thought faking would be stressful. But then this weird thing happened. I found out I was more relaxed in cover than when I wasn’t in cover. It was easier than being not in cover, kind of.”

  “That’s because you’re a natural,” said Glines.

  It brought me no end of relief that Poumakis also declined to acknowledge this comment. It meant that I was not the only one whom Poumakis found unanswerable.

  “In cover, daily life wasn’t that stressful at all,” Poumakis continued. “Sometimes I liked pretending to enjoy horn quartets with a target more than I liked talking about, like, Arcade Fire, my actual favorite band, with a person I actually liked. It was just easier. The awkwardness of trying to be real with someone just went away. You didn’t have to try to be real. I’m pretty sure I have mild PTSD, and I get this depression that comes for a little while and then goes. That didn’t happen when I was in cover. It was like being drunk.”

  Glines gave himself a neck rub. “If it’s like being drunk, sign me up,” he said. “I’m going to Sudan.”

  No one laughed. Next door, someone threw a Frisbee into a tree, and water fell from the leaves, the sound of sudden rain.

  Glines looked panicked now that his joke had bombed. To save him, I dove in, started talking. “It’s great to have you here,” I said to Poumakis. “But besides just getting to grill you about all the badass shit you’ve done, we were kind of hoping you could give us some advice. I mean, you’ve done Navy Hell Week, probably, right? Tell us the tricks you learned. How do you make things shitty for a bunch of pledges?”

  Poumakis vaped again. “Navy Hell Week,” he said, “is, you’re swimming in the ocean on four hours of sleep catching hypothermia and there are drill instructors with megaphones telling you it’s cool if you want to quit and go have coffee and donuts. They’re shouting at you about how there’s no dishonor in quitting, go set yourself free. They want 75 percent of you to quit, they expect you to bail. You’re not trying to make these pledges quit. You’re just trying to make things shitty for them, right? Because if 75 percent of your pledges quit, you don’t have a fraternity.”

  We conceded that this was the case.

  “Right. You want to make things shitty for a guy? Lock him up and leave him alone.”

  Glines seemed to see a chance to redeem himself here. He put on a serious face and nodded, as if he were about to take notes.

  “Have you done that?” he asked. “In the field?”

  “I’ve done interrogations,” he said. “And the weird thing is, people can’t stand it when you leave them by themselves. They bang on the walls until they elicit a response. Or they pretend to be sick until they elicit a response.”

  Glines was getting excited again. He had fully recovered from his failed joke. He rubbed his knees a little as he spoke. “You put them in a shithole?” he asked. “A box kind of thing?”

  Poumakis shook his head. “With the guy in the Sudan, I put him in a room for a week. Not in a shithole. In a clean, plain room with food and water. Then I’d bring him out and You Me Same Same with him. He was always up for small talk, even to me. The next day, I offered him a sparkling water. We went for a walk, under guard. The day after that, I said, ‘Come on up to our quote-unquote kitchen, we’ve got some cabbage, some yogurt, some eggs, some fruit. Let’s see if we can slap together a real meal, because neither of us wants to be here but while we’re stuck here, might as well, right?’

  “The next thing you know, he’s like, ‘It’s better than the food at camp.’ And later, he’s like, ‘You think your rifles are shit? You should see the shit rifles we have.’ Gradually, he gave me more and more of what I was after. He wanted to keep it going. He wanted company.

  “He had to know what I was doing, but he went into denial about it. That’s how much he hated being by himself. That’s how badly he wanted
some You Me Same Same. Can you imagine how he felt, when I put him back in his room and he thought about the information he’d given me in exchange for a little bit of bullshitting? It must have been torture for him. I tortured the guy, in a way, is I guess what I’m saying.”

  “He sounds like a pussy, though,” said Glines. “It wouldn’t have been torture for a guy with balls. It would have been dinner.”

  There was something about this last word, the way it hung in the air. Glines was just trying to be supportive of Poumakis. I knew him well enough to know that. But he had started to sound like an asshole. Glines, whose acquaintance with torture consisted of the lobsters of Vinalhaven snapping at his gloves, talking about what you would and wouldn’t do if you had balls.

  For the first time in the evening, Poumakis showed annoyance. He didn’t look aggressive. It was more like he was shutting down. The lower half of his face disappeared into his hood. Instead of stroking his beard, or his fleeces, his hands lay still on his knees. His posture was erect.

  “If you want to make Hell Week bad for a pledge,” he said, “I’ll tell you what you do. You bring him into this house, and you lock him in one of the bedrooms. Throw in some milk and bananas, throw in some water. Give him a bedroom that has a bathroom, with a toothbrush, a shower. Paint over the windows, take away his phone, don’t let anybody come anywhere near him. For the first few days, he’ll beg and plead with you. He’ll say, ‘Please, take me out of here.’ Then he’ll stop, and for the next few days, he’ll cuss you out. He’ll say, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care what you do to me anymore. I hate you. Don’t come near me.’”

  Poumakis drew the hood back from his face. He swiped at his cheeks as if there was a mosquito trying to bite him. His eyes were bright and brown and he raised his scant eyebrows, settling into his lecture. The music was different now, a song about going out and having a good time. It sort of fit the sagging house from which it issued. As the singer discussed a night in the club, the dance floor, the VIP, the labels on his clothing, a kid with a shaved head and full-sleeve tattoos had slouched out of the house and lit a cigarette. With the cigarette in his mouth, he got on a bike that was too small for him and rode it in a circle around the yard, one hand on the left handlebar, the other hanging at his side. His shin hairs were golden in a yellow light that shone from the garage.

  “When the week is over, you let him out of the room. But don’t let him out of the house. Let him take a walk down the hall. Let him look out the window. Let him walk up and down the stairs. Invite him to dinner.”

  Glines looked at the grass. He had his head down and was fiddling with the brim of his Sox cap. Without meaning to, I shook my head at Poumakis. I didn’t want him to keep going, because I didn’t want Glines to be further shamed. But Poumakis wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out over the yard, tugging his beard into a triangle.

  “Offer him the best food you have,” he said. “Chef Bill’s chili. Pour him a nice cold beer. Gather round the table, and say, ‘Welcome, brother. Pull up a chair. We’re the ones who did that to you, and we’re in charge of everything. No need to be shy. Please, join us.’”

  SONNY LIEW

  ■

  The Most Terrible Time of My Life

  FROM The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

  Part art book, part bildungsroman, part history of Singapore, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye documents the life and work of a fictional graphic artist from Singapore. The following excerpt is drawn from the second chapter of the book, and begins with a chance encounter between the story’s eponymous protagonist and a young writer who will become his most instrumental collaborator.

  IVAN CHISTYAKOV

  ■

  The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

  FROM Granta

  “Thanks to ideology,” wrote the Soviet author and one-time prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, “the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.” Next to nothing is known about the guard in a Siberian forced labor camp who kept a diary from 1935–36, excerpted here and published in 2016 with a translation by Arch Tait. A caption on a photo in his notebooks reads, “Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937–38. Died at the front in Tula province in 1941.” His is a homesick, frozen, and callous voice from the last century’s mass grave.

  9 October 1935

  A new stage in my life:

  10 p.m. It’s dark and damp in Svobodny. Mud and more mud. The luggage store is cramped and smoke-filled. A prop holds up the sagging ceiling, people sprawl on the floor. There is a jumble of torn quilted jackets with mismatched patches. It’s difficult to find two people who look different, as they all have the same strange expression stamped on their faces, the same suspicious, furtive look. Unshaven faces, shaven heads. Knapsacks and trunks. Dejection, boredom. Siberia!

  The town hardly lives up to its name. Fences and more fences, or empty land. Here a house, there a house, but with all the windows shuttered from the outside. Unwelcoming, spooky, depressing, cheerless. My first encounter: not a smart, upright soldier of the Red Army but some sort of scruffy partisan in a shabby greatcoat, no tabs on his collar, scuffed boots, cap plonked on his head, rifle over his shoulder. The local community hotel is a village house partitioned into cramped rooms. Overheated. Incessant snoring.

  10 October 1935

  Morning. I walk down Soviet Street. Unmetalled, no pavement. More fences, pigs, puddles, dung, geese. I could be in Gogol’s Mirgorod, but this is Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway Central.

  HQ is a two-storey brick building, with flowerbeds and a modern electric clock. Road signs: two reflective triangles and a 30-km speed limit. Same mud. Hostel. More mud.

  First night in my life feeding bedbugs. Cold. No discipline here either. Incessant swearing.

  “Panteleyev, don’t give me that crap. Malingering, that’s what it is. You know what we call that?”

  We call it a crime.

  Swearing to the rooftops, incessant, so dense you could lodge an ax in it.

  VOKhR, the Armed Guards Unit. Bunks, colored blankets, illiterate slogans. Some men in summer-weight tunics, some in winter tunics, jackets quilted and not, leather or canvas or string belts. They lie on their beds, smoking. Two are grappling, rolling around locked together, one with his legs in the air, laughing, squealing. Another laments his lot with a wheezing accordion, bawling, “We are not afraid of work, we just ain’t gonna do it.” Men cleaning rifles, shaving, playing draughts, one even managing to read.

  “Who’s on duty here?” I ask. “Me,” another partisan replies, getting up from poking embers in the stove. He’s wearing padded winter trousers, a summer tunic, winter felt boots, and a convict’s hat back to front on his head with a tuft of ginger hair sticking out. There’s a canvas cartridge pouch on his belt. He starts trying to tidy himself up, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain how to behave. I find out later this sentinel has never been in the army and only had a few months’ training on the job. What a hero! Few of them are any better. What am I doing here? I ask myself. I feel ashamed of the little square lieutenant’s insignia on my collar tab, and of being a commander, and living in 1935 across the road from the nationally celebrated Second Track of the Trans-Siberian Railway, shamed by a brilliant, soaring concrete bridge.

  22 October 1935

  I spent the night in a barracks hut. Cold. Killed a louse. Met the platoon commander. He seems pretty thick, etc. Walked back along the railway track.

  My thoughts are all over the place, like pages torn out of a book, shuffled, stacked, crumpled, curling like paper on a fire. I’m disorientated. Lonely. Sad.

  Twenty days ago I was in Moscow, alive, living my life, but now? There’s no life here. There’s no telling how high the clouds are, and it’s impossible to take in the endlessness of the hills and the emptiness of the landscape. One hill, then another, then another, then another, on and on for
thousands of kilometres. It’s bewildering. Life starts to feel insignificant and futile. It gives me the creeps.

  Moscow! Moscow! So far away, so out of reach!

  Freezing temperatures. I hope they finish the earthworks on the bridge soon and I’m moved somewhere else. A comforting thought, providing I ignore the possibility it might be somewhere even worse.

  23 October 1935

  I slept all night in the warm. The joy of sleeping without needing a pile of bedclothes.

  The day greets me with a stiff breeze as I walk along the track. Zeks grafting, inching toward freedom with every cubic meter of earth they shift and every meter of rail they lay, but what do I have to do to get demobbed? I didn’t wash today: no water. Tomorrow? Probably still none. I can only dream of steaming in a bathhouse. Bathhouses make you happy. Bathhouses are heaven.

  24 October 1935

  Autumn is all around. There are haystacks, and the first ice on the River Arkhara appears. Autumn is brown. The haze above the distant hills merges with the horizon and you can’t make out the sky, what are hilltops, what are rainclouds. A steady wind blows constantly and the oak leaves rustle in lifeless synchrony. The sun does shine, but it’s pale and cold, a nickel-plated disk you can stare at. Was I really born to be a platoon commander at the Baikal-Amur Mainline forced labor camp? How smoothly it happened. They just called me in and sent me off. Party members have the Party Committee, the factory management, and the trade union to intercede, so Bazarov gets to stay in Moscow. For the rest of us, nobody puts in a word.

  26 October 1935