Chapter 10

Summary: Chapter 10, The Nature of Love

The events presented in this chapter jump around in time.

Six years into their marriage, John and Kathy are still passionate about one another, making love impetuously. One night while at a political event, John drinks too much. First, he drives Kathy home to have sex. Then he drives them back to the party. He gives a speech, performs a few magic tricks for the crowd, and then leads Kathy to the garden, where they have sex again despite it being winter. John needs to be loved. He even went to war to be loved.

John proposes to Kathy at a college bar. But before they can get married, John goes to Vietnam. He writes Kathy letters about how much he loves her. He tells her some of the things he sees and his nickname, Sorcerer, but he doesn’t tell her about the deaths.

As a kid, John makes lists of the magic tricks he wants and then goes to the magic shop even though the woman who works there, whom he calls Carrot Lady, scares him. The atmosphere at home is always tense after these trips. His father would suggest watching a basketball game, but John never agreed.

In Vietnam, one morning something is wrong. John hears machine-gun fire and sees a dead woman, dead cattle, and burning huts. He shoots indiscriminately at things. Later, John finds himself in an irrigation ditch. When PFC Weatherby greets him, Sorcerer shoots him too.

In 1976, John is elected to the Minnesota state Senate. He and Kathy celebrate.

In Vietnam one night, Charlie Company have set up camp when they take on mortar fire. No one is injured. Sorcerer leads a patrol to the village to round up civilians. He performs a magic show for them on the beach. For his final trick, he gives an order and makes their village disappear through an artillery attack.

A young John practices magic tricks while watching himself in the mirror. The mirror makes everything better, for in the mirror, John’s father smiles and loves him and stops drinking. Even though other kids love John’s father, the man teases John for being husky.

At night, John and Kathy walk around their neighborhood, looking at the houses and planning which one they will buy. John wishes he had a trick to make a house appear now.

Sorcerer shot PFC Weatherby by reflex, but he tricks himself into believing it never happened. Sorcerer keeps that secret along with many others, fooling himself and everyone else.

In 1982, John is elected lieutenant governor. By then, he and Kathy have marital problems, but they still believe they will make a happier life.

When John is eleven, his father takes him to the magic shop, where John chooses the Guillotine of Death for his Christmas present. Carrot Lady still works there, and she demonstrates the trick first and then suggests John’s father put his arm in the guillotine. Nervously, John’s father obliges. Carrot Lady asked John if he knows the trick. John does, and he grabs the blade handle, understanding that knowing magic gives him power.

Since John is afraid of losing Kathy, he sometimes wants to crawl inside her. They both have their secrets. Sometimes, on Saturdays, John follows her. Kathy feels like he is always there, and John agrees that he is snaking around inside her.

In Vietnam, Sorcerer is at home among the enemy’s trapdoors, tunnels, and underground chambers, which are like tricks. Nothing in Vietnam is what it seems. Nobody knows why they are at war or who is fighting it. Everything in Vietnam is a mystery. Sorcerer holds his own secrets, including the secret of Thuan Yen, which he keeps even from himself. One night, he tries to talk with Kathy about the horrors he experienced in Vietnam. Kathy playfully deflects the seriousness of his words. John tries to tell her more, but she won’t talk about it. She offers to go to the movies instead.

Sorcerer never speaks about PFC Weatherby, but he thinks about him.

On the day of his father’s funeral, John practices magic in the mirror and tells his father that he isn’t fat.

Neither Kathy nor John suggest he seek psychiatric help. John concentrates on his marriage and career, but sometimes he cries out in his sleep, scaring Kathy. He has no memory of his dreams. Afterward, John can’t sleep and would watch Kathy instead. He would place his hand above her mouth and see disturbing images from his past. John would see a new trick: a man and a woman swallowing each other up until they disappeared forever, and then they would have no memory and no secrets.

Analysis: Chapter 10

Chapter 10 skips back and forth from John’s childhood to his relationship with Kathy to his time in Vietnam. The narrative can seem disjointed, but the details included in this chapter contribute to a fuller understanding of who John is and the forces that made him that way. This fuller understanding of John will help the reader as they navigate the path ahead.

As a boy, John had experience living in a world full of conflict. His father bullied him and demeaned him. To deal with this unpleasantness and, later, his father’s death, John created an alter ego in the young magician who spent much of his time practicing tricks in the mirror, a mirror that showed a reality in which the world was better. Not surprisingly, when sent to Vietnam as a young man, John creates the persona of Sorcerer as a means to survive the death and destruction all around him. Sorcerer can adapt to his new situation in a way that John can’t. Sorcerer not only protects John; he also lashes out and channels the anger that John has felt since childhood. For instance, Sorcerer can play tricks that lead to the deaths of Vietnamese people and the destruction of entire villages.

Kathy notices this difference through letters sent from Vietnam. She dislikes Sorcerer, even hinting that Sorcerer might chase her away. Eventually, Sorcerer’s presence causes her to date other men. This distinct choice calls Kathy’s true response to John into question. Kathy seems totally in love with John when they are together, yet the Kathy who writes John letters grows more and more distant. Is Kathy merely responding to Sorcerer, or does she genuinely enjoy time spent away from John? Perhaps the all-consuming love that John feels for her has placed a heavy weight on her. A scene from their married life, years later, also indicates her discomfort with the secrets and weight that Sorcerer carries for John. At one point, John tries to share some of the chaos in his head with Kathy. He doesn’t feel real, he says. He admits he’s afraid to look at himself in the mirror because he might not even be there. Kathy glibly deflects his efforts at communication and even turns the conversation to sex to end it. John doesn’t give up. He explains that he has a desperate need to tell her what he’s done and what’s wrong with him. This time, all while not meeting his eyes, Kathy suggests they go to a movie. John receives a clear message from his wife to cease talking about his secrets.

Another detail focuses on John’s motivation for serving in Vietnam. In Chapter 7, Kathy suggested in a letter that John chose to enlist to further his future political career, writing, “I just hope it’s not part of your political game plan.” This chapter, however, ascribes John’s enlistment to gaining the love he always craved, which his father has denied him both in life and in death. Yet both reasons for enlisting can exist simultaneously. If John goes to war to be loved but John also wants to be a politician to help people, going to war will make it easier for him to be elected to office.

The short section about Sorcerer being confident that he will go unpunished for the murders he committed is quite significant. In three paragraphs, readers learn that John killed a fellow soldier, PFC Weatherby, a man he claimed to love, and then embarked on the lifelong project of covering up what he had done. This is at least part of the trauma from Vietnam to which the narrator has previously referred.

At the beginning of the chapter, readers also see John and Kathy engage in risky behavior at a political party after drinking. This incident, which involves leaving the party to have sex and then hints at having sex in the garden, is notable because of John’s father's alcoholism, which likely contributed to his awful treatment of John and his suicide. That John would engage in such reckless behavior at a political function indicates that he might have a drinking problem himself.

Taken together, these elements show readers the lack of clarity in John’s mind. Just as he once convinced himself that his father was alive in the mirror while knowing this belief is untrue or as he married Kathy even without breathing a word about her betrayal, John’s psyche is such that he can hold two discordant ideas at one time. When he was a child, the mirror helped him perform this feat. Likely as an adult, it is the persona of Sorcerer that helps him allow two opposing possibilities to coexist in his head.