The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [55]
"Skip the educational part, doctor. I've no head for those things. Let's get straight to the part where you predict my future," said the Emperor.
"I am a scientist, your Highness. I do not predict.' I render a diagnosis."
"Mais oui, Lattimore. I'm making light of your profession, your science. I make light of everything, doctor. No offense was meant. I'll make it up to you. Before you go, we'll take a little visit to that armoire that I'm sure you have heard so much about." The Emperor smiled. "You may choose an item, a small item, as you don't render the usual services."
Yet another wink, you tell me.
Not a subtle man, I agree.
You seated the Emperor of Vietnam in a chair. As you raised the magnifying glass to his eyes, you felt a rush of intuition. You looked immediately into his right iris, and there it was—a cluster of small spots at about five o'clock, a twin of Prince Norodom's. This time you did not hesitate.
"Impotence, your Highness."
The young man across from you collapsed, you tell me, as did the one who had sought your services just a day before.
You ask me to do the same for you, to tell you a story of my life, to let you hear it in the language that urged me into this world, a language whose words now congest my head and flood my heart because they have nowhere else to go. Trapped as it is inside my mouth, my Vietnamese has taken on the pallor of the dying, the faded colors of the abandoned. I comply with your request but within minutes, I can tell that the experiment is disastrous, a torture that your body is responding to with a noticeable curving of the spine and a heavy-headed plea for mercy. The pleasure that I take from your words, you cannot take from mine. You are unused to the darkness that surrounds you, stuffs itself into your ears, coats your tongue. You struggle instead of letting your body float. It is the first time that I see you cry. I swear I will never do it again. I have been expertly trained, I try to tell you, if not bred for such things. Your training is different.
My comprehension, Sweet Sunday Man, is based mostly on my ability to look for the signals and interpret the signs. Words, I will grant you, are convenient, a handy shortcut to meaning. But too often, words limit and deny. For those of us who are better trained, we need only one and we can piece together the rest. We look for blood in the whites of your eyes. Anger, sadness, all of the emotional extremes register there first, a red spider web, a tangle of red rivulets. They all start there and then wash down your face, coloring your cheeks, your neck, the valley above your collarbone. For the subtler details, we consult the dark, round pools, lighter at the shallow edges and darker in the centers' deep, where light collects and falls inside you. Lies, you should know, always float to the top, foreign objects that, for most people, cause considerable discomfort and pain. There are some who are able to still the shift from side to side, calm the spasms of the irritated lids. A skill, I am afraid that you are either born with or not. The origin of a liar is the same as that of a lie: from one breeds another. Shame is often mistaken for one and the same, but I know it is different. Shame is heavy-hearted and does not float. It prefers the deep, where it disrupts the steady balance, tilting the gaze, forward and down. The lids behave differently as well. They are slow to open, slow to let anything in. Shame often passes for a sudden bout of exhaustion, a sleep that will not be delayed. It affects the whole body, slowing down speech, bloating limbs, until paralysis is a constant threat. Shame, I can assure you, Sweet Sunday Man, is the more toxic of the two.
12
THE FIRST TO NOTICE was the gardener's helper. This in itself was peculiar given his advanced age and his otherwise turtlelike existence. In what must have been a requirement of his profession, the helper always wore green, a cotton shirt tucked into a pair of slightly heavier-weight canvas pants, both faded, like dried-out