by Knox, Tom
And now he turned to Julia. She had been silent all through this, but she responded to his gaze. Lifting her phone, she said, “I can get us out of here. I’ve been in touch with Rouvier. When we reached Bala, there was finally a signal. I spoke to him several times. He has been working for us; he’s spoken to his superiors, who have spoken to European governments. He thinks the Chinese government probably wants this over, hushed up. They might do a deal. Just expel us.” She shook her head. “But the army is coming. So if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen soon. You really don’t have much time. You need to decide.”
Jake’s gaze rested, finally, on Chemda. The face he could no longer love.
48
He lay back on the neurosurgeon’s table, which was more like a tilted throne. Bright lights shone down on his scalp, while a silent nurse sorted through a cutlery of steel tools. The nurse was the only other staff member who hadn’t fled. What pitiable fact had kept her loyal to the end?
“I will have to do the anesthesia myself,” said Fishwick, from the far side of the room. He offered Jake a melancholy smile. “Don’t worry, I do know what I am doing. It’s the surgery that is problematic. Potentially.”
Jake stiffened with anxiety. He gazed around the empty, white, laboratory-like chamber. Chemda wasn’t present; she had told him she couldn’t bear to watch. Jake wondered if he could blame her for this.
“How long will I be under?”
“Two hours. We need to work fast.”
Two hours, Jake thought. Just two hours. And then what? The terrors were gathering at the door of his future. Would he wake, and, if he woke up, would he still have a mind? Did he even want the guilt to return?
The silence in the room, while Fishwick washed his hands at a metal sink, was unbearable.
“Talk to me,” Jake said. “Please. Talk to me.”
“Of course.”
“Just talk. Tell me what are you going to do, after all this?”
Fishwick sighed.
“I would maybe like to make some repayment … for what I have done. Perhaps I could work in Chinese hospitals, treating epilepsy with neurosurgery. The procedure is, er, similar. Religious visions and spiritual epiphanies closely mirror the neural process of epileptic seizures.”
Staring into the bright white light of the surgery lamps, Jake absorbed this thought.
“So you think religion is just a kind of epilepsy?”
Fishwick gazed at the paper towel in his hands.
“Well … as I implied, before, over many years, I developed doubts about the whole concept.”
“Doubts. And?”
“I was once, as you know, a devoted Marxist. But as I investigated the links between Marxism and social structure and religion, it struck me that…” Fishwick allowed the nurse to snap some rubber gloves on his wrists. Then he continued: “It struck me that the worst societies are nearly always the atheist societies. Hitler’s Germany. Mao’s China. Stalin’s Russia. And the Khmer Rouge, of course, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the most brutal of all, the most violently atheist. The land of the prophecy, hmm? The land without religion. And so much blood.”
“So …?”
“In just a hundred years atheist Communists and atheist Nazis killed hundreds of millions … comprehensively more than any religion. And yet they did it for ideological and philosophical reasons, they did it for reasons which were themselves quasi-religious.”
“And what does that mean?”
The tools of Fishwick’s business twinkled in the overbright lights; the stainless silver scalpels, the exquisite cranial drills.
“This is the real reason that they are going to close down the lab, Jake, why even the hard-core Communist Chinese lost interest in Sen’s work. It turned out that the people who had the surgery, the Godectomy, here, they ended up with as little interest in communism as they might have had in Islam … or Zoroastrianism.”
“Why?”
“Because communism is just another belief system. Hmm? Another irrational belief system that uses the same neural structures. Communism relies on faith and devotion and revelation, it has sacred texts—Das Kapital, the Little Red Book—it has saints, prophets, and priests. It believes in a heaven, a Utopia, which is just a heaven on earth in their case. And Marxism is just as illogical as the craziest faith: everywhere that communism has been tried it has failed, dismally.” The neurosurgeon leaned to check an oval glass dial on one squat and glinting machine. “Yet still the true believers believe, they are sure we shall see heaven on earth. They have, after all, faith.”
“Except an even more destructive one,” Jake said. “A savage and godless faith. Right?”
“Yes. A religion with no morals, quite lethal and disgusting. Leaving millions killed. If communism is their Koran, if Marx is their Bible—then it is a Bible of the Dead.” He paused for a long second. “And many of our patients were proof of this equivalence: following the operation, it turned out they were all deeply skeptical of communism, just as skeptical of communism as they might be of Mormonism, or horoscopes. And when the Chinese realized that Sen’s laboratory was churning out people with no faith in the orthodox stupidities of Marx and Mao, that’s when they lost interest.”
Jake was sweating now. Hot and sweating.
“Ironic.”
Fishwick agreed, with a pensive smile. And stood close.
“We’re nearly ready. Jake … the temperature levels of the thawing process are vitally important. There’s just a few moments to go….” A quiet word was swapped with the nurse.
Jake said, “Keep talking. Before I change my mind. Please?”
Fishwick obeyed. “As it happens, Cambodia also provides the most interesting counterexample, on which I have often reflected. Indeed, a year or two ago I began to vigorously reexamine all the ancient history. For instance, I went back to Site Nine in Laos—they preserved just one site intact for researchers. And, crucially, I also visited Angkor.” He was staring into his own surgical lights. “Ah, Angkor Wat. Perhaps the greatest and most beautiful preindustrial society we know: exquisitely advanced, enchanted, a kingdom where government was truly united with the image of the divine, of the godhead—”
“The faces of the Bayon.”
“Yes.” The American tilted one of the vast surgical lights a fraction of a centimeter. “You know, the builders of Angkor even left a sign to show that they knew the importance of proper faith to civilization.”
“The diamond in the forehead of the great Bayon faces.”
The light was shining on Jake’s forehead. Fishwick answered:
“Yes. Perhaps instinctively, the builders of Angkor knew the preciousness of true religion. They even guessed where it might lie, the God module, in the head. They certainly remembered the terrors of the Black Khmer, trepanned, lobotomized, and godless … on the Plain of Jars.” There was another murmured conversation with the nurse. The surgeon swiveled, and explained: “Jake, this is it. In approximately ninety seconds, the cryoprobe will be at the correct temperature. So if you want to turn back, you need to speak up now.”
Jake’s heartbeat was chaotic: skipping with fear. He quelled his terror with another question.
“No. I want to know why you carried on with the surgeries, if you had these doubts.”
Fishwick nodded, his face a shadow behind the lights.
“Because I kept convincing myself … against the growing evidence. After all, there are so many good, solid, Darwinian explanations for why religious faith has evolved. And yet I also had evidence of the necessity of faith. People who have faith are healthier, happier, they live longer, they even have stronger immune systems. This is scientific fact. So I became … very confused.” The nurse was calling Fishwick to scrutinize a larger machine, which resembled an ECG monitor. The surgeon softly spoke to the nurse and returned to his theme. “Then, one day, quite recently, I discovered another very curious fact during my research. It’s Parkinson’s disease. People who have Parkinson’s, even the
mildest form … are less likely to be believers.”
The nurse was standing with the rubber mask, ready to hand it over.
“And that means?” Jake grasped at the last shreds of this reality. “What does that mean?”
“It is therefore at least arguable that atheism is a form of dementia. Imagine that! Atheism is a kind of psychosis, a mental illness. The healthy mind is, very, very truly, a mind that believes.” An electronic chime rang across the room. “OK, Jake, that’s the signal. The temperature is critical, we need to do this … right now. We can’t wait any longer.”
“Wait, I want to know.” Even as the rubber mask of anesthesia was clamped over his mouth, Jake felt the cry of a question in his godless mind. “I still don’t know why. Why does it make us happier? Why are we meant to believe?”
But his question was met by the black silence of unconsciousness.
49
“How do you feel?”
“The same. Different. I don’t know.”
Jake was awake. Sipping a hot drink. He had been conscious for an hour, in the dark, but now the lights were on, and Fishwick was gazing at him with a quizzical expression.
“Perhaps you need to see … to go outside. To assess your reactions.”
Jake knew what this meant: go and look at the world, go and see Chemda. Find out whether his guilty soul had been retrieved from erasure.
He stood. Again he felt an odd composure, a sweet stability; not the quailing weakness he expected following serious surgery. Did this mean the surgery had worked? Or simply done nothing?
At least he could talk. He wasn’t a drooling fool.
A loose jacket slung over his shirtsleeves, he stepped out of the room. At the end was that dazzling silver oblong: the glass door that gave onto the terrace, the door that opened to the truth.
He walked and pressed the glass and he breathed the thin light air of Balagezong. Julia and Chemda were seated at the tables and staring his way. In a crushing second he realized: he felt the same, he felt nothing. He felt nothing for Chemda.
The truth was so anguished, he couldn’t bear to describe it. His face must have spoken eloquently enough: Chemda turned away. She put a hand to her eyes, disguising her emotions. Jake didn’t know if she was crying or not. He didn’t especially care. The sun shone down. No one said anything. There was nothing to be said; nothing was ever going to be said, ever again. Faint cirrus clouds striped the sky beyond White Buddha Mountain.
Within hours of the surgery’s completion Jake was able to confirm this cold realization—the operation had totally failed: the sense of detachment remained just as before, the feeling that he existed in a world where all music had been subtly removed.
But at least he hadn’t died, or been calamitously lobotomized. And the guilt about his mother and his sister, that was still gone.
The first days of his recovery he spent lying in bed or sitting quietly on the terrace with Chemda, feeling awkward. Sometimes Chemda tried to smile, to touch him, to kiss him. But his inert reactions eventually dissuaded her. And in time she simply retreated to her room.
And left him alone.
Next day, the soldiers came. The army, and then the police. This was less alarming than they had feared. As Julia had promised, Rouvier had done a politic and convincing job, through the French, U.S., and U. K. governments, in ensuring that they were saved from custody; and in neutralizing the complexities.
Rouvier was apparently aided by the attitude of Beijing. The Chinese surely wanted to cut a deal; they were evidently embarrassed by the whole business. Jake even suspected they had actively held off from taking over the lab complex so as to let events play out; so that Beijing was ultimately untainted by the whole scandal. With that outcome, the authorities could plead a plausible ignorance—and flush the whole unsightly business down the latrine of history.
Jake saw this desire in the way the officials behaved. The police were brisk and efficient yet eerily detached, uninterested. They questioned them several times, and questioned Fishwick, they took photos of the “crime scene,” and they took away equipment for tests, but it was all rather cursory. Jake was sure that the photos and interviews would be simply trashed, at a convenient moment.
And then the specialists and the soldiers departed and it was just the ordinary police. One of them was particularly friendly.
Jake was sitting alone on the terrace, sipping his fine pu erh tea. The young, smiling, English-speaking Chinese policeman came over and looked at Jake’s scar and said that Jake was allowed to stay a few more days in Balagezong, for “rehabilitation and recuperation”—two words the man found very difficult to pronounce. But then, the policeman implied, it was definitely expected that Chemda and Jake and Julia would make themselves strangers. Go back to Bangkok. Go home. Go anywhere. Just go a long way from China.
Then the policeman made the first and only reference, albeit oblique, to the unspoken deal. He gestured across the mountainscape and smiled and said, “You are a photographer, no? Maybe you should do some photographs of the beautiful gorges here. Publish them. This is the only reason to come here. This is all people need to know, yes?”
Jake had a blanket over his knees, like an invalid at the beach. He nodded. He knew what this remark meant. Their silence was indeed being bought. The Chinese wanted the troublesome foreigners gone, but they would let them go only in return for silence. The policeman smiled again.
“People do not want to know about the old China. They need to know about the new China! No? And the National Park of Shangri La Gorge is coming! That is what you must tell people.”
“Shangri La?”
“Yes. Xianggelila.” He laughed. “Shangri La. The name is taken from the book by a British man, I believe? The secret Himalayan paradise. It is good idea—good brand. It will change the lives of these peasants.”
“They’ll build a proper road?”
“Yes, yes! And many toilets, and cafés. Shops! And why not? This is most beautiful place in the world, so there must be toilets and cafés and buses and shops. It will be wonderful. This is progress!”
He grinned. “And now I say goodbye. There is last village truck leaving for Zhongdian in four days. You must take that. We need to begin the … destruction of this…” He winced with distaste. “This laboratory. The army will return to do this job. So we can build the park.”
“Yes,” Jake said, sensing the resignation in his own voice. “We’ll go on the last truck. Thank you.”
The man turned and briefly saluted and the hollowness returned.
But another person was hovering. Fishwick.
He pulled up a seat beside Jake. He poured himself a glass of pu erh tea.
“I’m also leaving this afternoon. With the authorities.”
“What are you going to do?”
“As I hoped, they have agreed to let me work … with epileptics.”
Fishwick stirred his long spoon in his tea.
“Jake. I just wanted to say something. Do you recall … the last question you asked me, just before the surgery?”
“Yes. I do. Why are we meant to believe?” Jake squinted at the American.
The older man hesitated, then pointed with his long steel spoon and said, “Look at that mountain. The beauty of it. It is eloquent, is it not?”
“Sorry?”
Fishwick momentarily closed his eyes. And he spoke quietly:
“The answer to your question only came to me a few weeks ago. I was standing by the stupa, Bala stupa, under the Holy Mountain, and somehow it dawned. I saw. I realized that perhaps the God module evolved for the most profound and obvious reason of all.”
“Which is?”
“It’s not a byproduct, it’s not a spandrel or a parasite or a trick, it’s not even something to keep us chatty and cheerful and healthy … it’s…”
“It’s what?”
Fishwick gazed at Jake. “We evolved eyes to see the sunlight. We evolved ears to hear the wind. And our minds are
wired for faith … because?”
“You mean we are meant to believe because there really is a God? You have become a believer?”
The surgeon shrugged, and gestured, once again, at the sublimity of the landscape around them.
“You know, the villagers here, they were once so isolated, just sixty years ago, they thought they were the only people in the universe. Imagine that?”
But Jake didn’t want to imagine that, he didn’t want to imagine anything. He didn’t want to think of his own cold, withered future, gray as the sands in Sovirom Sen’s Japanese garden. So he stared at the gorges and at White Buddha Mountain. He stared at the nothingness.
Fishwick was sighing. “I really do have to go. I am so sorry the surgery proved irreversible. All I can say is—have a little hope. Sometimes neurones can heal spontaneously, we don’t know why. The mind retains its many mysteries. Goodbye, Jake.”
Jake watched him descend the steps and disappear down a path that led to the rear of the laboratories.
The wind from the forests was mild. But his tea was cold. And the hollowness inside him was profound. Like a silenced bell.
50
The days passed, the nullity abided. Jake dreamed of nothing. He stared at the sky. The day of their departure approached.
On the seventh day following the failed operation, Jake woke early and looked across the bed.
It was empty.
There was a note on Chemda’s pillow, in an envelope.
He took out the notepaper and read.
I know you don’t love me anymore; and I know you can’t help it. This is too painful for me: because I still love you.
Goodbye.
C
He put the note back in the envelope; he dressed. Trying not to think. The very last truck was due to leave Bala this afternoon. He wanted to run outside and race down the valley. He didn’t know what to do.
Julia was sitting on the terrace.
“Chemda has gone,” he said.
She stared at him, and her gaze was searching. “I know. She told me last night. A villager was taking his fruit to Zhongdian market at dawn. She went with him in the pickup. I’m sorry, Jake.”