CHAPTER 24

Sussman figured he’d already won the lottery when they didn’t send him to die in Vietnam. It was a blessing to live long enough to get cheated by a friend and fade into old age and then nothingness. Ten out of ten GIs killed in action would agree. Viewing the inevitable torments of life within a broader context was something he’d been training his mind to do for years, yet he was always surprised when it worked. The shock and fear had almost passed. He wouldn’t end up like Jerzy Kosinski—a fine writer who’d survived the Holocaust but eventually stuck his head in a plastic bag when he could no longer scoop up checks at Elaine’s.

“When Samuel Clemens went broke,” said Bento, “he went out on a lecture tour and paid off all his creditors.” Sussman knew this Bento kid from somewhere, but when you really like someone, it can feel like you’d always been acquainted, and in a way you always were.

“That’s kind of you,” Sussman said, “but I don’t belong in the same sentence with Clemens. Daffy Duck, maybe.”

How could Sussman take credit for accomplishing tasks he barely remembered performing? He wasn’t even sure he was still the same Sussman who wrote the book that made him famous. And fame was fleeting and certainly relative. If Clemens could be resurrected to deliver one of his talks next week, much of the population would prefer to play Grand Theft Auto. Lecturers in demand these days tended to be bilious blowhards like Terrance F. Feldman of the New York Times. Sussman wondered whether Speed and Bento knew all about his storied meeting with Feldman in a hotel lobby just before Sussman dropped off the earth to Orcas Island. Of course they did.

The renowned, round-faced columnist was being followed around that day by a denim entourage of UCLA business students. Sussman never learned the nature of their connection to Feldman, who was decked out in his trademark bow tie and starched white shirt. He seemed to believe that when two illustrious figures such as he and Sussman met by chance they should exchange more than perfunctory greetings. He proposed they have coffee. Sussman was curious to know more about this Times scribe coming straight from a visit to the famous, faintly ominous Rand Corporation down the street in Santa Monica. They walked past lovely french doors to an aromatic patio festooned with exquisite flowers and tropical plants. Sussman had been told that Jordan’s Queen Noor was among the hotel’s guests that day. He also recalled two slender, fashionably dressed women, probably Russian, who sat next to a fountain and smoked throughout their meal, taking bored drags between bites.

Feldman, a prominent member of the chorus that cheered America into the Iraq disaster, remained aboard the slow-motion train wreck for years. But his columns mentioned it less and less as the war sank deeper into its own self-generated bullshit. Yet Feldman’s reign as policy seer rolled on undisturbed. He still churned out books, columns, and lecture tours advising readers what to think. Lately he’d been counseling Americans to embrace what he saw as a dynamic new age of transnational economics created by bold, digitally connected knights of finance and technology. It was, he wrote, the next great stage of human development. Although Feldman implied that you had to be really smart to recognize which way the wind blew, he also said that it was as plain as the nose on your face.

Sussman wondered how this impervious, middle-aged narcissist summoned the nerve to keep dishing out instruction. Shouldn’t he be out in the street doing penance? Perhaps with a begging bowl. Sussman, feeling frolicsome, asked him the precise amount of his speaking fee, which was rumored to be in Bill Clinton territory. He noticed only a flicker of displeasure as the soothsayer drew his verbal sword and commenced cutting to pieces pitiful Sussman, who suddenly felt less like an artist who’d written the definitive Vietnam novel and more like a stammering schnook. On another day Sussman might have stood toe to toe, but he must have been at the wrong end of his biorhythmic spectrum. The business students rolled their eyes with multiorgasmic rapture as Feldman crushed oddly tongue-tied Sussman with polysyllabic pomposity that probably came straight from the pages of his latest book. The only break in the assault came when a waiter in a black suit came around for their order.

After the subdued Sussman finally slunk away, Feldman rushed to write a celebrated column that dismissed him as an idiot savant who’d gotten lucky with one mediocre novel chronicling a war Sussman never saw in a place he’d never visited, a novel that misconstrued, as far as Feldman was concerned, the deeper complexities of the national interest and failed to understand where we’d been, much less where we were all going. He didn’t even bother to dismiss the two Sussman books that followed Marching with Kings and were received with decidedly mixed reactions. The column hit like an encyclical whose time had come, the final seal. Even many of Sussman’s readers—disgusted that he’d failed to give them whatever they’d dreamed his next novel ought to be—joined the lynch mob.

The fresh savaging of his reputation assaulted Sussman’s taut psyche at a tender time, and he checked into the commune as a battered survivor seeking refuge from the dogs of intelligentsia. He was barely acquainted with the two communards who invited him to their little island settlement, and though he didn’t quite admit to himself that an inane crapmonger like Feldman could wield such power over his life, he grabbed the lifesaver without checking the place out. The residents were shocked he actually showed up. No one had mentioned money, but by the time he arrived, their search for tranquility and higher spirituality was constantly interrupted by the disappointing sales of home-baked bread and handcrafted knickknacks. His hosts, behind on the rent, showed him to a room with a soft mattress and a badly stained rug. They gave him the last of the overcooked eggplant culled from a nearly empty pantry. The next morning he wrote them a check that became a monthly event. The residents began treating him like their personal rock star.

“That’s exactly what I went up there to get away from. At least that’s what I thought,” Sussman told Speed and Bento. He didn’t mention that the communards’ worship was tinged with resentment conveyed so subtly that it faded in and out like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. No one among the fourteen members claimed any special status, but a leader had emerged, and after a while he concluded that the flat ban against alcohol, tobacco, sex and drugs smacked of tyranny. Sussman agreed that the place was short on fun, which after all wasn’t specifically prohibited by Siddhattha Gotama’s dharma. Three residents departed, but four others took their place. Two were nicely proportioned females. Sussman, soon revolted by his weaknesses, reminded himself that we’re mostly born to fail, like all those Darwinian mutations that didn’t work out. A typical destiny was reached by millions of spermatozoa turning in the wrong direction or showing up at the wrong time. But he needed time to reabsorb that lesson, to think everything through. It’s what he was supposed to be doing, why he went up there in the first place.

The commune’s isolation was real. The little settlement took up a tiny corner of an island whose other inhabitants tended to mind their own business. The communards remained solidly opposed to TV, Internet, and all the handheld electronic addictions that were rapidly turning the world into a vast village of fuckwits. Sussman had once turned down a similar though less libertine living arrangement after a small press published his collection of short stories. The stories, which preceded Marching with Kings, were noticed by a literary foundation that considered writers a breed of homeless denizens. It periodically offered selectees a bed and writing desk at its woodsy New England location. He thanked the well-meaning twits but pointed out that writers don’t generally need a place to flop. They need cash, just like everybody else.

SUSSMAN FELT the three years on Orcas were well spent, that he’d actually made strides toward freeing himself of anger, jealousy, Schadenfreude, and other regrettable attributes that had dogged him for decades. He still became dispirited from time to time but was gradually becoming a human being he didn’t revile. He even made small attempts to resume his writing, mostly just unconnected thoughts in search of a theme and a story. Marching with Kings was inspired primarily by guilt over spending most of his army hitch at Fort Riley, Kansas, smoking weed and filling out supply forms while a steady stream of kids passed through to Vietnam.

PFC Sussman was an old man of twenty-three, drafted after college. Most of the other draftees around him were nineteen-year-olds too poor or too honorable to buy their way out of the war. At night he took them to places where girls from nearby Kansas State University could be found. But the girls mostly despised the kids with GI haircuts who they assumed were eager for a chance to bayonet Asian babies. Or maybe what they really despised were boys too unsophisticated or too poor to hide out in college. Where were those girls now? Old ladies somewhere, perhaps divorced, playing golf, bragging about grandchildren. And where were all the boys who passed through Fort Riley? Thousands upon thousands of them.

“You feel sorry for us, don’t you?” one of them asked Sussman. A kid with a trace of Midwestern twang and hair of dark straw. Sussman had barely noticed him. He was tall with a face that disguised nothing. Sussman made no effort to remember his name because he didn’t understand at the time that he’d carry the memory of the kid to his grave.

“Yes,” replied supply clerk Sussman, astonished that this kid had so effortlessly perceived what was in his heart. Sussman was at that moment driving several of his wards into town in an old station wagon he’d bought a few months earlier from a mortar squad kid going over.

“Don’t,” said the kid. “There’s not one of us who wouldn’t trade with you if we could. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

By then everyone knew the war was bullshit. The nineteen-year-old Midwestern rifleman on his way to possibly die in it was a bodhisattva, an enlightened being concerned not for himself, but for Sussman. He was there to point the way, and Sussman prayed the kid made it through his tour okay. If he could just do that he’d be fine. All the ingredients of a good life were already his. And now Sussman worried for Pick as the teenage rifleman had worried for shirker Sussman. If Sussman had children he might feel obligated to get some of the loot back for them, but Pick was his child in a way, just as Sussman was a child of the rifleman. Maybe she hadn’t planned to screw him but just lost her way and ended up in Brentwood. He hadn’t always been terribly kind to her, and anyone who’d betray a friend to acquire more wealth must be bubbling inside like a volcano. A lost soul.

Yet Pick could also be inspiring, particularly when she talked about her invented brother. It was a generous story, a parable invented to illustrate a truth. Soldiers in Iraq really were electrocuted in Cheney’s Halliburton-built, war-profiteering plumbing, and they were all somebody’s brothers, fathers, or sons. The electric-shower death of an invented brother was infinitely more truthful than analysis from intellectual sociopaths like Terrance F. Feldman.

THE LAST time Sussman saw the tall kid with straw hair a sergeant out on the company street was chewing him out in 100-degree heat for a smudged belt buckle. The rifleman, standing at attention, made no effort to hide his amusement. Sussman looked into the eyes of this kid who was still ten thousand miles from the war and he saw Marching with Kings laid out like a scroll. All that was left was to write it down. He perceived it as the Biblical Joseph perceived his brothers, with fear, boundless affection, and ultimate forgiveness. Sussman didn’t feel blessed by this vision. He wasn’t sure he wanted to carry the burden of it, but he couldn’t resist its power.