Strange Highways

ringing, when my heart was thundering, when every fiber of my being strained toward death, I was hoisted into the air and allowed a few breaths before being plunged beneath the surface again. He had ordered that wires be attached to my genitals, and he had given me countless jolts of electricity. Helpless, I had watched him beat a friend of mine to death, and I'd seen him tear out another friend's eye with a stiletto merely for cursing the soldier who had served him yet another bowl of weevil-infested rice.
     I had absolutely no doubt of his identity. The memory of the torture master's face was branded forever in my mind, burned into the very tissue of my brain by the worst heat of all - hatred. And he had aged much better than I had. He looked only two or three years older than when I'd last seen him.
     "Pleased to meet you," I said.
     "Likewise," he said as I ushered him into the house.
     His voice was as memorable as his face: soft, low, and somehow cold - the voice a snake might have if serpents could speak.
     We shook hands.
     He was five ten, tall for a Vietnamese. He had a long face with
prominent cheekbones, a sharp nose, a thin mouth, and a delicate jaw. His eyes were deeply set - and as strange as they had been in Nam.
     In that prison camp, I had not known his name. Perhaps it had been Nguyen Quang Phu. Or perhaps that was a false identity that he had assumed when he sought asylum in the United States.
     "You have bought a wonderful house," he said.
     "We like it very much," I said.
     "I was happy here," he said, smiling, nodding, looking around at the empty living room. "Very happy."
     Why had he left Nam? He had been on the winning side. Well, maybe he'd fallen out with some of his comrades. Or perhaps the state had assigned him to hard farm labor or to the mines or to some other task that he knew would destroy his health and kill him before his time. Perhaps he had gone to sea in a small boat when the state no longer chose to give him a position of high authority.
     The reason for his emigration was of no importance to me. All that mattered was that he was here.
     The moment I saw him and realized who he was, I knew that he would not leave the house alive. I would never permit his escape.
     "There's not much to point out," he said. "There's one drawer in the master-bathroom cabinets that runs off the track now and then. And the pull-down attic stairs in the closet have a small problem sometimes, but that's easily remedied. I'll show you."
     "I'd appreciate that."
     He did not recognize me.
     I suppose he'd tortured too many men to be able to recall any single victim of his sadistic urges. All prisoners who suffered and died at his hands had probably blurred into one faceless target. The torturer had cared nothing about the individual to whom he'd given an advance taste of Hell. To Nguyen Quang Phu, each man on the rack was the same as the one before, prized not for his unique qualities but for his ability to scream and bleed, for his eagerness to grovel at the feet of his tormentor.
     As he led me through the house, he also gave me the names of reliable plumbers and electricians and air-conditioner repairmen in the neighborhood, plus the name of the artisan who had created the stained-glass windows in two rooms. "If one should be badly damaged, you'll want it repaired by the man who made it."
     I will never know how I restrained myself from attacking him with my bare hands. More incredible still: Neither my face nor my voice revealed my inner tension. He was utterly unaware of the danger into which he had stepped.
     In the kitchen, after he had shown me the unusual placement of the restart switch on the garbage disposal beneath the sink, I asked him if, during rainstorms, there was a problem with seepage in the cellar.
     He blinked at me. His soft, cold voice rose slightly: "Cellar? Oh, but there is no cellar."
     Pretending surprise, I said, "Well, there sure enough is. Right over there's the door."
     He stared in disbelief.
     He saw it too.
     I interpreted his ability to see the door as a sign that destiny was being served here and that I would be doing nothing wrong if I simply assisted fate.
     Retrieving the flashlight from the counter, I opened the door.
     Protesting that no such door