by Knox, Tom
“Chem?”
Her eyes lifted. They found his regard and she said: “How do you feel? How do you feel about me now, Jake? Now they have done this?”
He gazed at her and gazed around, and he surveyed the meaningless circle of summits, above the plunging and pitiless gorges. And he knew that what he really wanted was to have sex, maybe with Chemda, with her firm, eager breasts. Or maybe with one of those cute Tibetan girls in the village, with their rose-apple smiles.
But he didn’t love her. He wanted to fuck her. But he didn’t love her. He didn’t love Chemda anymore.
It was true. Why deny it? He just didn’t love her, not in that special, ludicrous way. No. She was beautiful and sexy and he liked fucking her. Of course. She was a fine woman, intelligent, moral, and he respected her, he could imagine her as his wife, but love? That was all absurd.
He didn’t love her. Love was a neurochemical reaction, a disorder of the hormones, a ruse designed by nature to make men procreate and then hang around with some yowling brat for at least eighteen months until the trick of love expired like free software with a time limit, so no, he didn’t love her, but he still admired her and he desired her. And they were friends.
Jake happily smiled and kissed Chemda on the cheek, and she looked at him fearfully and said:
“What have they done to you? Jake? Tell me? How do you feel?”
Her soft hand went to his head and she touched the top of it, and, as if he had been injected, he felt a stab of sharp pain.
His hand reflexively went to his head, to the scar. A scar? He had a scar on his head.
He was freshly scarred. The top of the forehead.
44
The guards were at his side. They forced him to sit.
Tyrone sat beside him, and talked: “Don’t think of it as someone cutting out your soul, think of it as cosmetic surgery. Or laser tooth whitening! Don’t be a fucking pussy all your life.”
Jake stared at his friend. His old friend. His mortal and immortal enemy. The world spun on an axis of inversion.
“You did it already?”
“We did it already. You were in a coma, so we took the opportunity.”
“But what—what was the point? I’m … already an atheist.”
“Ah, but are you? Or were you?” Tyrone smiled, and the mountain air was as cold and bright as his smile. “Always struck me that you’re one of those people that hates God rather than actually not believing in Him. Take a long look at all that load of guilt, the guilt you carry, what is all that but the same guilty God module working away in your head?” Tyrone pointed at his own head, and twisted a finger.
“But Ty, you—”
“All that shit about your dead mom. And your sister. Don’t you ever want to draw a line, move beyond the guilt and grief? Dude, your dead mother has been sucking the life out of you for too long. Get rid. You are like someone born attached to a dead twin, and you’re still dragging the corpse. So we decided it was time to cut the cord. Snip!”
“You fucker. You bastard.”
“Me?” Tyrone laughed. “Ungrateful. I arranged all this for you. Don’t you get it?”
“How?”
“Because I saw the story. Let Sen explain.”
Sen sat on the other side of Jake. Chemda was across the wide white table, her face covered with her hands. He wondered if she was crying. He didn’t care. He felt a certain unburdening—in that he didn’t care.
He didn’t care.
Sovirom Sen narrated, gesturing languidly at the low-slung concrete buildings:
“This is, I like to believe, the most amazing laboratory in the world, doing the most amazing work. But the Chinese have lost faith in us. You see? We used to be funded by the Chinese military. We were rewarded with proper guards and equipment and resources, precisely because we could manufacture those perfected soldiers for the PLA. But these days, it’s all change, always change.”
Tyrone stepped in: “All that organ-harvesting, brain-changing shit, it’s bad PR for the new superpower. And the Chinese ardor for communism has abated now they’ve all got BMWs. So they got a bit dubious.”
Jake swiveled in his seat, Tyrone put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Thurby. So you may as well listen. You want to know what’s going on, right? So. As we were saying, Sovirom Sen is not so popular anymore, so he has been forced to employ his mistakes. Those guys with the scars at the back gate, who tried to pump out all your blood. They need a lot of blood for these surgeries—these guys have been told to take blood off unwanted guests, if they get the chance, but not just anyone. But they won’t listen. They’re a symptom. This place has problems.”
“Still don’t—Just don’t get it. Why do it to me?”
“This is why you should have stuck to the camerawork. You’re just a photographer, a monkey, a snapper. You’re not a writer, not a real journalist. You never really saw what a great story you had here, did you? But I did, I sensed it, from the start. So I get to do it.”
“You’re doing all this … for the story?”
“Yes! And what a fucking story!” Tyrone closed his eyes, and his voice stiffened: “Hard by the Himalayas, in the high green forests of wild north Yunnan, expert Chinese scientists have perfected the most astonishing neurosurgical procedure in history, the removal of religious belief, excised from living brains.”
He chuckled. “That’s not a bad opener, isn’t it? That’s my Pulitzer, right there. So yeah, when Sovirom Sen came to me, asking for my help, explaining everything, yeah, I saw how we could work together. I saw the synergistic possibilities.”
“You did it for the job. Fuck.”
“Sure. Because Sen needs money and backers for his experiments to continue his work. Not least, he will need a new location, new backers, very soon—when Beijing closes him down. And to get these new funds he needs publicity, he needs the story out there. He needs the world to know his success. And that’s where I come in. I am going to write it up, me, me, the real writer.” A sly smile. “But before he gave me the whole story he said I needed to prove my credentials, prove my commitment, give him something he wanted—so, yes, I told him where you two were staying in Bangkok, so he could grab Chem, get her away, take her to China. I persuaded him not to touch you, because I am your friend! Your savior! But I also knew this was only a stopgap.”
Tyrone stared Jake in the eyes. Unblinking. Then he continued:
“Put it this way: I knew that no matter how many times I rescued your ass—you were still in love and you would come a running after Chemda, and Sen would, eventually, try to kill you again for being an irritating bastard. And he would, eventually, succeed. But what could I do about this?” Tyrone turned, for a moment, his profile framed by the blue Bala sky. “And then, a day later, as I thought about the story, the way the story could work—well, then I had another worry, Jake: I realized that if I was gonna make the whole thing sing, give the story real emotional impact, I needed to convince people of the good work. The final and eventual success.”
He smiled with an almost believable sincerity. “Because, let’s face it, this is a hard sell. So many have been scarred or lobotomized. Mutilated. Turned into monsters. So I knew I needed a truly positive payoff, something for everyone to invest in, some powerful narrative to distract from the failures, some dazzling human interest, a personal case of a man whose life was transformed—for the better, Jake, so much for the better—by this incredible new surgical technique.” A tiny, theatrical hesitation. “And then I had my epiphany. Of course! I suddenly thought of you, pal, old guilt-ridden, superstitious Jake Thurby. I saw that I could kill several birds with one prizewinning stone—if I made you the end of my story! I could finally save you from Sen and yourself—and at the same time I had my brilliant ending. You would be my human interest, the man rescued from his guilt and neuroses by this neurosurgery. My denouement. You. So I told you where Chemda was being hidden, just knowing you would go stra
ight to her. No need for any dangerous stuff on the streets of Bangkok, you would come to us. And so you did! And that’s where we are, despite a few hiccups. So you see? You get it?” Ty actually winked. “Now here we are, you are a new man, a very different man, sitting in the sweet Himalayan sunshine—feeling cleansed and new. And that’s my perfect payoff that brings the story to life! You are my ending. My Pulitzer. I thank you.”
He did a small, sarcastic, vaudevillean bow to his audience. Jake bridled. The guard was standing close, hand on the butt of a pistol.
Sen gestured to the guard to step back. And he turned to Jake.
“Consider things, Jake. The wise man must always consider things. Isn’t it rather desirable to be rid of all that lumber, that trash, that compost at the bottom of the mind?”
“Fuck you.”
“Perhaps so. But we didn’t do this very difficult procedure because we hoped you would become a drooling cretin, a palsied fool like Ponlok. We did this because we really have perfected the operation. Thanks to Colin Fishwick here, such a brilliant neurosurgeon, we have succeeded. And you are our latest success, the greatest success. Finally you are rid of religion, the ridiculous guilt and shame and self-deception. Don’t you want to be rid of it? We all need to be rid of it.”
“Fuck off.”
“But I am correct, am I not? It is time we moved on as a species. At present we are still at the Klamath level. Have you ever heard of them? The Klamath are a Pacific tribe, in North America. They are my exquisitely ludicrous favorites, Jacob, my favorite example of the noxious and warbling stupidity of religion. The Klamath worship a flatulent dwarf goddess who wears a buckskin skirt and a wickerwork hat, and whenever the mosquitoes are especially malign on Pelican Bay, the Klamath ask their midget goddess to blow away the mosquitoes by farting out the wild west wind. They also believe the world was initially created out of a minuscule purple berry.”
Jake felt the cold wind on his scalp, the shaven patch where his hair had been, where his soul had been.
“Are we any better than the Klamath, Jacob? Are we? When we take Holy Communion or pray to Mecca or commune with the smirking Buddha we are, in essence, still requesting the sixty-centimeter-high dwarf goddess to fart away the mosquitoes, no?”
Jake inhaled; the world was drifting. He tried to fight the sensation. He knew it was pointless. What was done was, incredibly, done.
He walked away from the table and gazed across the silent chasms to the silent peaks. The strangeness of it all was this: Tyrone was right, he felt clearer. Calmer.
Happier.
45
“That is Balagezong. We chose it for its remoteness.”
Sovirom Sen was standing beside Jake.
Jake said nothing. He gazed at the wildness of the view.
Sen spoke again: “The village of Balagezong is so remote the locals speak their own language. Their own version of Tibetan, barely comprehensible to anyone else. Until we built the dirt roads for the lab, you had to walk five days to reach the gorges. Then another five days to reach the next village. It was perfect for our purposes.” He sighed. “Until recently. At the moment we live and work in pristine isolation—but now they want to put a national park here. They will demolish the labs, turn them into stores. And then there will be tour buses, guides, bringing people to the most beautiful place in the world. The last frontier of China. Someone in Beijing wants to make money from the landscape. These days they all want to make money.” Sen grimaced and gestured to the left. “The mountain next to it is sacred. White Buddha Mountain. Piquant.”
Jake gazed at this imperious summit: the slender yet mighty gray pyramid of stone was delicately striated with snow.
“Twenty-two thousand feet. The Holy Mountain of Balagezong. Of course, you will no longer feel the holiness. Correct?”
Jake sought inside himself for his reactions, his new and true reactions: and with another jolt of surprise, a reflex inflected with more delight, he sensed that he did feel differently. That cringing awe was gone, the shrivel of feeble smallness, the reverential humiliation of man confronted with the ineffable hugeness of the universe. Gone. Instead Jake surged with species pride. I am me. Alive. I am conscious. Man, noble man, the most noble work of evolution.
“I feel … different, cleaner. Lighter.”
Sen laughed. “Of course you do. You have had a parasite removed, a prion of stupidity. The most poisonous of mental viruses.”
“I feel, somehow, more free? Maybe blithe is the word.”
“Absolutely so, Jacob. And you will get used to it. Very quickly. We find that our subjects need only a few hours to adjust. Indeed, the swiftness of the transformation is remarkable, given the complexity of the neurosurgery. Mr. Fishwick is truly a genius, which is why we pay him the salary of a European soccer star. This is, of course, not very Marxist, but we do what we do! The end justifies.”
A Tibetan villager passed close to the terrace, carrying a basket of juniper wood. Jake smiled at the villager, who glanced his way and nodded, with a feudal humility, touching a forefinger to the fold of his purple headscarf, then he walked on along the mountain path, to the lower fields.
Sen continued, “Our early operations, our first surgical errors, these were, I accept they were … tragic errors. I am candid enough to confess this. My wife volunteered and I could not stop her, likewise my son in law. It was perhaps foolish to try such ambitious surgery with the primitive facilities and incomplete knowledge we had at the time. But we were true Communists, as we remain today. Keen and zealous, Jacob—and ardent for perfection. And you cannot make an omelette for the emperor without breaking thousand-year-old eggs. I did my utmost to help those we maimed. I employed Ponlok. Many of our guards are wretched victims of our earlier, botched operations. But the tragedies of my wife and Chemda’s father only fueled my desire to get it right. I knew the ultimate goal was worth any suffering. And so we learned over the decades by trial and error, and now we have succeeded.”
Jake stepped forward. Hesitantly. Something else was echoing in his mind, a lost voice, an absent voice, telling him … something.
Leaving Sen behind, he walked down the steps of the terrace onto the path. He followed the route of the peasant for a few seconds, then paused in the hard, high mountain sun.
The spectacular view stretched away beneath him. A precipice fell to the tiered and tile-roofed houses of the heaven villages, maybe a kilometer down; then small enclosures of jasmine and apricot trees; and then the mighty gorges beyond, infinitely deep. Black, subtropical, three kilometers down, a different world. They were surrounded by cliffs and gorges and mighty summits. Maybe the most beautiful place Jake had ever seen.
And yet his reaction to the splendor was calm, less impassioned. He no longer wanted to take photos. He didn’t need to mediate the beauty or the terror, the world was what it was. Not so frightening. Mountains and sun, cliffs and turnip fields. Barefoot women with headscarves crouching in the mud, tugging roots. Jake didn’t care too much. He didn’t care at all.
He didn’t care.
That was the difference, that was the substance of the change. His mind was entirely lucid now, deliciously clear, clear as the air of Balagezong: he could stare across an unclouded landscape at last, to the blue remembered hills.
He saw himself as a small boy. Running down the road with his sister. This memory was new, this memory was old, this memory had lain locked away inside him for so long—but now all the doors of perception had been slammed open, the fire doors, the barriers he had erected to the truth: they had all been blown away. And he remembered.
Jake was seven and his sister was five, and they were running down a street from school and then Becky tore herself from his hand and ran laughing stupidly into the road, and Jake saw again his sister hit by the car, thrown like a gruesome doll, batted casually to the side and broken, blood everywhere, dead. Her body smashed. Blood framed her blond head and her white eyes rolled and stared.
The heaven vi
llages stared up at Jake; he stared down. He was standing above heaven, superior to heaven. I don’t need you anymore.
All this time he had been thinking it was his fault: all this time, somewhere inside him, he had felt the gnawing guilt, without quite knowing why, because he had repressed the memory. But the memory was now presented to him, and he was glad amid the tragedy.
His sister, his poor sister, she had run into the road and there was nothing he could have done. It all happened in a second. Not his fault.
Energized and heartened, Jake paced back along the yak path to the stupa at the other end of the village. A Tibetan man in chuba and cotton trousers was spinning the glittering brass prayer wheel. He acknowledged the white man with a vacant, smiling shrug; Jake smiled back and sat on the steps of the stupa and gazed at the elegant triangle of the Holy Mountain. White Buddha Mountain. The forests were hanging from the steep gray slopes, catching the mist in their dark green branches.
And here came the second memory, delivered to his feet, small and sad and insignificant. A rabbit returned by a dog. A shot bird, feathers scattering forlornly.
His mother. Jake could remember the chain of events, with new and superb clarity. He had woken in the night, age nine or ten, and seen a face looming above him: his mother, crying, her long hair wet, whispering in the dark and saying goodbye, saying, Jake, I love you, I will always love you, and kissing him. And then she was gone.
A white face, in the night, the white face of his mother, with the dark tang of wine on her breath—hovering and then gone. The next morning they realized she had left them—abandoned them all. Broken and drunk and unable to bear the grief of Rebecca’s death, she had fled.
Eyes locked on the warm blue skies, Jake seized upon this simple truth. That was why he had dreamed those dreams. Women with white faces and disembodied heads: it was no witchcraft, it was just a hidden echo, a concealed trigger.
It had just been a tragedy. It was not his fault. It was just a meaningless tragedy that happened to a piteously small boy—himself.