by Knox, Tom
Jake sat up; he was in a bed. A clean white bed in a clean white room without windows. Tyrone was standing at the end of the bed, laconically leaning, skinny in his blue jeans.
“But…” Jake sought his watch. His watch was gone. “Where am I? How long have I been out?”
“Six fucking days! You nearly died. The doctors had to put you in a coma. Induced. To save you. But you should be fine now. We put all your blood back. Those idiots, the morons, on the back road, they thought you were someone else. We didn’t think you would take the back road.”
“Ty.” He was beyond confused. He wondered if he was still hallucinating. “Where am I?”
Tyrone pulled up a chair and sat down.
“Balagezong. In the clinic. Top of the mountain. Bala village. Great views. Shame you haven’t got any windows.”
The electric realization shot through him.
“Chemda!”
Jake leaped from the bed—but he didn’t leap from the bed. A metal clanking noise, and a sharp pain in his ankle, told him why. He was chained: ankle-cuffed to the steel frame of the bed.
Uncomprehending, Jake stared at the irons clamped around his leg. He was a prisoner? Then why was he rescued?
Tyrone tutted.
“Relax. Chemda is fine. And here, take this, madman.” Tyrone threw a plastic bag onto the bed. “Sorry about the leg irons, necessary precaution. We thought if you woke up in the dark and panicked and bolted, you might wander off a cliff. Or get angry or something. Lot of cliffs around here.” He grinned. “Hey. You must be hungry, eat the food and I’ll come back in a moment. We can talk more. Lots to talk about.”
Tyrone walked out of the room. Jake stared at the blank white concrete wall. Chemda was OK? What was going on? How had Tyrone made it here so quickly? Had he really been unconscious for six days?
It was too much. He was very hungry.
The plastic bag contained bottles of mineral water and a couple of sandwiches wrapped in foil. Jake drank the water and ate the food. Then he lay back, still hungry, staring at the bruises in the crook of each arm. Where they had tried to drain all his blood.
So he hadn’t imagined that.
There were so many questions, it was tiring: physically wearying. He found himself drifting into unconsciousness once again. His sleep was disturbed by the creak of the door.
Tyrone. The American gave him another sardonic smile.
“That’s better. Bit of color in your cheeks. For a Brit.”
This time Tyrone pulled up a chair, swiveling it so he was sitting reversewise, arms laid on the top of the chair back. Jake gazed, the bewilderment fighting the tiredness in his mind.
“OK,” said Tyrone. “Give me your questions.”
“All I care about,” said Jake, “is Chemda. Where is she?”
“Patience. Jesus, you really do love her, don’t ya? She is fine. Unharmed. What next?”
“Sovirom Sen. Did he make it here?”
Tyrone pulled the chair nearer.
“Yes. He’s here.” Tyrone sighed. “OK. Yes. It’s confusing: let me explain. First thing you gotta know. Prepare yourself.”
“What?”
“Sovirom Sen is Khmer Rouge. And not just that. In the 1970s he was a member of the elite, just beneath Ieng Sary and the Butcher. A cadre. A leader.”
Jake fought his utter confusion. “Sen? But Ty, he is a known anti-Communist, famous for it.”
“Dude, he lied. He is a liar. He lies. He was the most committed Communist of all. But the Khmer Rouge fell. And of course he is not stupid, he is a very clever and far-sighted man. Sharp as fuck, like all the KR. He realized that to survive and prosper in the postregime era he had to pretend that he hated communism, hated the Pol Pot regime.”
“How could you get away with that?”
Tyrone’s smile was pert.
“You think he is the only one? How many former Khmer Rouge officials are now at the top of the Cambodian government? Some of the more foolish are open about it—many more conceal it, the more subtle operators, perhaps. And the transition is easy. We see it across the world, right? Regimes change, yet the personnel stay the same. And in Cambodia everyone assists in the deception. Because the country’s tragedy is too large to endure, the grief too immense, two million too big. Only the deaf and the mute survive. And the only exit is survival. So they have this conspiracy of denial, of silence, of accepting the common lies.” Ty sighed. “Poor old Cambodia. Still, they shouldn’t have gone bat-shit crazy, should they? Gooks.”
Jake attempted a question: “But what does this mean? Now?
“I have pieced together the narrative, with a bit of help. Apparently the trouble began when Chemda, your beautiful, smart, and determined little Khmer princess girlfriend…” Tyrone’s eyes were bright. “The trouble started when she took a more detailed interest in the recent history of Cambodia. Working with the United Nations, the ‘reconciliation’ tribunals. Talking about the babies they smashed against trees. The monks they burned alive. The people they threw into the sea.”
“Sen tried to dissuade her.”
“Yup. He was worried, but then he reluctantly decided she should have her way. He reckoned she would soon tire of her idealism and meet a young man, and she would then want a family like any good Khmer daughter, and she’d give up the lawyering. But she persisted. And then she began investigating the Plain of Jars. Coming close to her grandfather’s history, to his concealed past.”
Jake gazed across the room.
“The professors in Laos?”
“They were pressured, and how. By Sen. Khmer Rouge people in Phnom Penh. The Lao. All of them together. And when Samnang topped himself, Sen thought that would be it, that Chemda would quit, yet he could tell from her phone calls that she was determined to continue.”
“So her mother got the witch to arrange the kun krak. To scare her off. I know that.”
Tyrone nodded empathetically.
“Yeah, that bit we know all about, right? Madame Tek was aware that Chemda shared her irrational superstitions. The mother hired the spider queen. To do the embryo juju.”
“And it worked—”
“But when she got back Chemda was the same girl! Mmm? Right? Still convinced of the need to confront the past. She just didn’t realize that confronting the past meant … unmasking her own grandfather. And you know how Chemda thinks. She reveres Papa Sen. Father Number One. Sen was like her real dad and Chemda was Daddy’s little girl.”
Tyrone abruptly stood. He walked to the other side of the room and gazed at a wall chart. A picture of the human brain.
“She loved and revered her grandfather. It would rip her open to know that Grandfather Sen was a friend of the Butcher. Of Ieng Sary. Pol Pot. And Sen in turn, apparently, rather likes his granddaughter’s love and respect, so he did not want Chemda’s hatred. He needed her out of the country, away from these mysteries. And they had another reason for her to leave.”
On the horizon, the truth was rising, like a sickening moon.
Jake asked, “Which was? This reason?”
“People were being killed. Scientists across the West. People who had helped in the experiments they did in Phnom Penh, the experiments that have continued here. Sen knew that danger approached. In desperation he thought maybe you would take her to England or America. She loves you, Jake. She would follow you, if no one else, right? You were their best hope. As a final inducement, Sen arranged for your apartment to be fired—”
“Sen? It was him? How the hell was that meant to persuade me?”
“Seems you left the Sovirom compound too soon that morning. You weren’t meant to see the actual fire bombs, you were meant to agree to the marriage and then go home and see the already gutted apartment and realize your life was in real danger. You would marry Chemda nice and easy—and take her far away out of harm’s reach, away from the terrible truth. And then papa-san would deal with the threat as best he could. But it went wrong. You escaped—eloped, even—and
then Sen got angry and decided to take more drastic action. In Anlong Veng. Kill you, seize Chemda. He felt you already knew too much. I saved your ass.”
“But what are you doing now, Ty? You saved me then? But what are you doing now? We have to save Chem, get her out of here, away from Sen—”
Tyrone sighed.
“I’m coming to that. You are my friend, Jake, really. I really did save you in Anlong Veng. I was rooting for you, dude, but then a couple of weeks ago…”
He paused.
“Tell you what. Maybe you need some visuals.” Tyrone walked to the door, pulled it open, and signaled to someone beyond.
Sovirom Sen stepped through; his smile at Jake was halfway between delicate pity and pure condescension. His smile at Tyrone was entirely civilized.
42
Tyrone nodded at Sen and turned to Jake.
“Two weeks ago Sen came to me in Phnom Penh and told me all of this, and he persuaded me that there was a solution to everyone’s problems.”
Jake was floundering and frightened. He gazed at Sen’s untroubled smile; he stammered.
“No—this—no—”
Tyrone tutted. “Hey. Shape up. You are missing one key piece of information. I’m surprised you haven’t asked the crucial question. The crucial part of the story is … Have a guess. Go on, just try.”
“What? What is it?” Jake could hear the needy tone in his own voice. He didn’t care. He was desperate. “Tyrone, just fucking tell me.”
“OK.” The American smiled. He was leaning sideways against the blank white wall, arms folded.
“The experiments were all Sen’s idea, it was his project. He conceived and directed the project. He and a couple of others, back in the seventies.”
The grandfather spoke. His bespoke shoes were truly incongruous in the utilitarian concrete room.
“Of course it was me. However, Jacob, it goes rhapsodically further than you have guessed. And here is why I have invited Tyrone into our … conspiration. It is a truly astonishing story, and Tyrone is a teller of stories. This is how I persuaded Mr. McKenna, by giving him the story—what we are really doing up here, in the wilds.”
“It’s crazy, Jake, a total mind-fuck, if you will forgive the expression.”
Helpless, Jake asked the only question: “What are you doing?”
Sen answered: “Recall, Jacob, how we discussed my loathing of irrationality, of superstition. Khmer legends, Chinese astrology, feng shui, geomancy. You remember our dialogue, Jacob? And remember how I affirmed the lucidity of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the nothingness. The taking away. The beautiful withered garden; the absence of God.”
“No,” said Jake, struggling with the concept, with the terror in his mind, the sense of something wicked approaching. “I still don’t get it.”
“So I will illuminate.” Sen came forward and tapped the end of Jake’s bed, almost paternally. “You deduced that we were trying to neurosection guilt and conscience, and that we failed. Well, in the years since then, the science has moved on.”
“How?”
“The original theory, Ghislaine Quoinelle’s elegant theory, was that the specifically human sense of guilt and remorse was the price we paid for our sudden leap forward in cognition, for the biological evolution in our neurology, changes that probably happened in the frontal cortex, the most advanced, recently evolved area of the brain. But during our conferences in Cambodia we deduced that the birth of guilt also meant the birth of religious faith, the birth of God. Because, when there is guilt, then God is not far behind. Only a god can punish or forgive—and therefore heal the guilt. Heal the species shame of Homo sapiens.”
His smile was polite, diplomatic.
“Since the 1980s your bold Western scientists have, not uncoincidentally, theorized that there may actually be a God module, a God spot, in the brain. A part of the brain responsible, as it were, for religious belief. People like Persinger in Canada, and Ramachandran, and Zohar, have specified areas of the cerebral cortex that are activated when we have religious experiences, epiphanies, conversions. Do you see the connections now? The brain, they say, is hard-wired for belief.”
He paused for effect.
“Of course I—and my friends in the Chinese elite, the Chinese military—we regarded the genesis of these theories with great interest. Because the speculations tie in so neatly with Ghislaine Quoinelles’s grand thesis, his ideas about the evolution of the human mind in the Paleolithic, the evolution of guilt and conscience in the cortex, in those…” Sen tapped the top of his forehead with a finger “… those younger neural pathways.”
Jake felt as if he were watching some speeded up film of a terrible organic process, a beautiful and terrible process. Narcosis, or decomposition.
“You’re saying—”
Tyrone intervened: “Jake, he’s saying that this is what they are actually doing. They have succeeded. They are doing it. They aren’t just spooning out guilt and conscience to make killers. They are going further: they are cutting out God, they are slicing the possibility of God out of the human mind.”
“Jesus. Jesus. A…”
“A Jesusectomy? A soulectomy. A stupidectomy!” Tyrone’s laugh was sharp. “Call it what you fucking will. But yes, that is what they are doing. And why not? How good is that? Get rid of it all, all the stupid fears of ghosts and demons and the bogeyman, all that praying and moaning and tambourine-bashing. Just cut it all out. That’s what they do.”
Sen stepped nearer to the bed once again.
“But we don’t just excise, Jake, we make people new, we manufacture them afresh, we make them perfect, and pure—and anatomically Marxist. Brains that are biologically incapable of belief. Minds that are immune to superstition.”
The room was silent for a second, until Tyrone snapped: “And guess what, dude?”
Jake shook his head.
Tyrone leaned near and put a hand on the ankle chain that locked Jake to the bed frame.
“You are going to see the results. We can prove it to you. It really works. It’s not the brutal intrusion you think, it works. It’s a miracle. It makes people better, smarter, happier. I’ve seen how it works, I’ve already met some of their successes, which is how Sen won me over.”
Jake gazed with pure and instantaneous hatred at Tyrone, and at Sen, and their chortling complicity. Of course. That’s why he was chained to the bed. In case he got murderously angry.
“You did it to Chemda. You always despised her superstitiousness. You hated that in her. You said it yourself—” He yearned to throttle the smiling patriarch. “So you cut it out? You fucking did it to Chemda! Your own granddaughter?”
Tyrone turned to Sen, who raised a consoling hand:
“So we have done the operation already. Why not? This is someone you love, someone very special. This means you will be able to … see for yourself the … transformation.”
43
“Please. Wear this, over your clothes. It is time for you to meet Chemda. We are going outside, and it’s a little cold.”
Sen was offering him a coat.
Two men came in, imperviously unsmiling Chinese guards, in some kind of uniform. They unlocked the shackle on Jake’s ankle. He swung his legs out of the bed and stood. As he did, he waited for the sense of weakness in his limbs; yet he felt nothing. Nothing? Nothing. He felt quite fine. Completely normal. Yet also anguished.
What had they done to Chemda?
He would have taken on Sen and Tyrone, here and now—but the silent guards were armed.
Neatly piled on a table, he found his clothes: clean boots and clean jeans, a neatly pressed, blue-striped shirt.
Dressed, and wearing the coat, escorted by the guards, Jake followed Tyrone and Sen through the door into a corridor, with a rectangle of silver and dazzling light at the end. A glass door.
Jake pushed the door and stepped onto a sunlit terrace, where he saw one man sitting at a large table laid with food for many. Jake recognized the figure from t
he photograph Julia had shown him: it was Colin Fishwick, a much older Colin Fishwick. The smile of Phnom Penh had been replaced by the sad, sad face of Balagezong.
Balagezong.
Jake stared across the table on the terrace, at Balagezong.
The laboratory complex was set on a vast butte of rock. Surrounding them, guarding them, even, was a hamlet of Tibetan houses, themselves surrounded by turnip fields and yak paddocks; a lane at one end of the village led to a white stupa where prayer flags rappled on a promontory of rock.
The sky was faintly veiled; blue skies smiled behind the translucent mist, like Buddhist paintings under rippling silk thangkas.
A noise. He turned.
Chemda.
She was approaching the table, her expression distant and opaque. He scanned her body and her head for signs of injury, but she seemed intact; yet the eyes were different, untrusting, clear but untrusting. He walked around the table and embraced her, and she kissed him.
The guards had hung back. Tyrone and Sen loitered at the other side of the table. Observing. They knew there was nothing Jake could do. He was imprisoned here, with his fate. He kissed Chemda again. And confirmed the bitter truth.
The kiss was different.
“Chem?”
Detaching herself from his arms, she said, “I’m OK. Thank you for trying to save me. Ah. Ah. What can I say.”
Her eyes said I love you but her words were worryingly staccato.
What had they done to her? She was different.
She pressed a hand flat on his chest and shook her head, and a tremble in her mouth told him she was near to tears. She shook her head again—as if she were trying to say goodbye but couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
All she said was: “I’m OK. They kept me here. Wouldn’t let me see you until they had done that thing. Their surgery.”
“So you know it all? The whole story?”
Her dark eyes avoided his gaze, her voice was low and murmuring.
“My grandfather, S-37, my family, his role, I know it all. Sonisoy? Anlong Veng? All of it. Ah. What can we do now, what choice do I have? It is too late anyway.”