Requiem for an Assassin

funeral, no burial, just a grief so confusing and bitter you start to choke on it, and the only thing that saves you from being paralyzed by that grief, being killed by it, is a rage so white-hot the sane can barely begin to imagine it.
    The rage has a purpose, you see: it offers an outlet. But it carries a heavy price. You do things you couldn’t have imagined doing, couldn’t have imagined anyone doing, things you can’t talk about afterward, not even with the men who acted with you. In that state, the things that make you human, your empathy, even your fear, they’re gone. You feel like you’ve died already, and you’re right in a way, part of you has died and will never come back. At that point, being killed is almost a mercy. Because if you survive it, if you survive your own death, the path back to life is almost impossible. After the war, there were men, hollowed-out men whose means of negotiating the world had been reduced to alternating silence and rage, who would try with earnest futility to explain themselves that way. “I died there,” they would say.
    I thought that, too, for a long time after. But now, watching from the back of a cab images of that stark country that had swallowed up my innocence, I thought, No, I didn’t die here. Vietnam is where I was born.
    And I’d never left. Not really. I’d been back to the States, then all around the world, then finally settled, at least for a time, in Japan. But the person who was born here had never grown up, never fundamentally changed. His body had wandered, but his mind had remained in the place that had formed it.
    Once, when I told Midori I wanted out of the business, she had asked me how hard I was trying. I felt my jaw clench at the memory. What horror had she ever endured? How could she, how could anyone who wasn’t there, imagine the way war changes you?
    Losing people, and not being able to properly grieve them, shrinks your world. You try to avoid attachments, anything that could hurt if you lose it. You start to say don’t mean nothing about everything, the important things especially. You learn that only a few people can be trusted, fewer and fewer, in fact. You feel used by your own government. The equipment sucks, the orders suck, you know the politicians don’t give a shit if you live or die as long as they’re reelected. And then, if you’re special, the way I apparently was, you get sent on a certain mission, where you can kill your own out-of-control best friend: my blood brother Crazy Jake, still the most dangerous man I’ve ever known. That brings it all together: the horror, the stifled grief, the silence, the distrust, the raging, all-consuming hatred.
    I got out of the cab in front of the Rex and declined a bellboy’s offer to help me with my bag. I wasn’t going to stay here, but I remembered the hotel from leave in Saigon and thought it would be a good starting point from which to refamiliarize myself with the city. I was glad it was still here, the silly crown over the marquee and all. Not just because it was inherently comforting to know that my memories weren’t only of relics, but also because familiar terrain would save me time and help keep me safe.
    I looked across Le Loi Street and smiled. The oddly named Saigon Tax shopping center was still there, looking much as it did in my memory, the main difference being the replacement of a Sony neon sign by one advertising Motorola instead. The French-designed City Hall to the Rex’s right also remained, its cream-colored balustraded façade illuminated grandly in the day’s fading light.
    I went into the hotel. The lobby had gotten a face-lift, but in its déclassé essentials it remained unchanged. I smiled in quiet amazement that a place could survive war, and communism, and the passing of decades so unperturbed. I moved in from the entryway, feeling like I was stepping back in time. The young man I was had come here with a prostitute, more than once. I was astonished at the clarity with which I could remember faces, and moments, even the names they had called themselves ten thousand nights ago.
    I took an interior staircase to the fifth floor, and then, ignoring the signs warning that only registered guests were permitted beyond, I explored the mazelike interior of the hotel. Beyond the public areas, it was all as it had been: hallways with open balconies at their ends; faded wood paneling and stalwart tiled floors; empty couches facing upholstered chairs in