* * *
•
You woke up to the chirping of crickets. As you walked to your car, you saw two flashes of red light in the distance. Simultaneously, two electric shocks penetrated your chest. The second shock, sustained, sent you thrashing to the asphalt. You were sure you were going to die, it was so extreme, like an electric chair enacting a death sentence. But it stopped. You stood and sprinted to your vehicle.
Sobbing, you sped belligerently into Loreto. You drove into trash cans and telephone poles. You threw empty beer bottles out of the car. You tossed the whiskey, the crack jar, the pipes, the empty bags of peanuts. You hit your brakes randomly, spun the steering wheel, made your car screech and spin. You threw your head back and screamed. You were determined to get arrested. You felt you were the victim of a grave injustice. If the CIA wanted you to stop smoking crack, they should have put you in jail—not violated your civil rights in your home country. You pulled up next to another driver and offered him twenty dollars to lead you to the police department. He obliged. About a dozen police officers stood in front of the station. “I got out of the car and I was crying. ‘I want you to arrest me!’ ‘Quiero que me arresten!’ And all of them were trying to be real nice. ‘Why? Do you have drugs?’ I told them I had been doing drugs, drinking, making a mess, throwing garbage all over the streets, speeding around the city. ‘I’m a danger to other people and to myself and I want to be arrested.’ ”
One officer invited you into the passenger’s seat of his patrol vehicle. You insisted that he handcuff you and throw you in the back. He acquiesced. Inside the jail, officers counted the thousands of dollars you had brought, recorded the exact quantity and stored it in a locker for you. Then they put you in a cell. You found an empty milk carton on the floor and used it as a pillow. Finally, you could sleep. The CIA would not bother you in jail. They had left you alone at the mental health campus. You had placed yourself exactly where you belonged. But as you were about to drift away, you felt an iceberg growing in your heart, causing you to choke and gag on the floor. The torture stopped. You gasped, trying to recover, then it started again—this time stronger than ever before. “I passed out like two, three times,” you say. “They went on and on like that…until I said: ‘Kill me, please; I’m ready to go.’ ” Each time, the torture stopped just when you were certain you couldn’t take it anymore. You stumbled to your feet, gasping and sobbing. You punched the concrete wall of the jail cell, breaking a metacarpal bone. Blood dripped from your knuckles. You fell to your knees. Another shock sent you facedown to the floor. “I felt like they were pulling my soul out of me—I got really—it was terrible. Terrible. Terrible.” You sigh, voice quivering in recollection. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. It fucking sucks, man.”
You shake your head. You look down at your trembling hands.
“Does it depress you to talk about it?” I ask.
“No, it’s just dumb; I can’t convey it to you properly, it’s—I don’t understand why you don’t write fiction,” you say. “You can make up better stories than this.”
FLIGHT
I submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA for records related to Marco Antonio Guerrero, resident alien of the United States, and include a signed authorization and certification of identity from my father.
The CIA responds promptly, informing me that my request is “denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).” FOIA (b)(1) applies to “information currently and properly classified, pursuant to an Executive Order,” and FOIA (b)(3) applies to “information that another federal statute protects,” including the CIA Act of 1949, which exempts the agency from disclosing its “organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed.”
In response to a separate request for records regarding experiments using electromagnetic and/or radio-wave technology on residents of San Diego County anytime between August 1999 and August 2004, the CIA says its primary mission is foreign intelligence and therefore finds my request inappropriate.
“The information you request, insofar as we can discern, has nothing to do with the primary mission of this Agency, and therefore, we regret that we are unable to assist you,” the agency writes.
I send requests to the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Justice and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). All respond that they have no records or decline releasing them based on exemptions.
* * *
•
It has been a decade since the national security correspondent Sharon Weinberger first gave a voice to the so-called Targeted Individuals, featuring their testimonies in the Washington Post article “Mind Games.” I call Weinberger while writing this book and ask her personal opinion about their theories. She has continued to cover national security agencies and authored the book The Imagineers of War, about DARPA. Could the CIA, DARPA or some other government agency in fact be experimenting on innocent people? It’s unlikely, Weinberger replies. She has found no hard evidence to support the claims of Targeted Individuals. But she maintains that they are not “crazy”—that’s not the right word to describe them. “I guess that was my point, that to just say these people are crazy is not, in the most part, correct,” she explains. The Targeted Individuals she interviewed sought logical explanations for their experiences. They did research. They were critical of unscientific claims. They printed out patents and academic papers. “In many ways, they had a sanity that was sort of impressive,” she says. “Instead of just saying they’re obviously all crazy, what if we just put aside the veracity of their claims and try to understand it on their own terms?” She says she was baffled when interviewing psychologists because they expressed no interest in the details of their patients’ allegations of persecution; their narratives were dismissed and medicated. “That, for me, is sort of mystifying; I mean, you’re studying—this is your career. It seems odd and unscientific not to be interested in [their stories].”
For months after her article was published, Weinberger found herself inundated with emails from self-described Targeted Individuals who wanted to thank her for “exposing” their plight or to request her assistance. She still receives about an email a day about “Mind Games.”
* * *
•
Back in San Diego after your trip down Baja California, you purchased a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, certain that the Netherlands, unlike Mexico, would not let the United States torture innocents. Once you arrived, however, you encountered a problem: taxi drivers—in your experience, connoisseurs of their city’s underworlds—informed you that crack was impossible to find. One driver took you to a plaza where a powder cocaine vendor prowled. As you cooked it in your hotel room, you smelled something strange—some kind of nerve gas. It made your heart rattle. You ran downstairs to request a new room, gasping: There’s some kind of gas leaking into mine. A hotel employee came to inspect it. He backed away from the door, coughing, confirming your belief. The new room was better. But three-dimensional geometric shapes sprouted all over the furniture, tiny brown versions of the portals to parallel universes you had seen before. You plucked them off the furniture and collected them in a jar, grateful for concrete evidence of what was happening to you. One of them was a four-sided pyramid with the top chopped off, and when you touched it, you felt a massive electric shock in the area of your brain stem. You had never felt a shock there before. It was unbearable, an iceberg erupting in your upper neck, enlarging it to the point of rupture. You ran downstairs crying for help. The torture intensified and you collapsed.
You awoke in the hospital. A radiologist held up your X-ray, showing you the broken rib. It stabbed your right lung with each breath. You beseeched the doctors for pain medicine but they refused to administer it, as if colluding with the CIA. You stumbled out of the hospital in agony. You hailed a cabdriver and asked him to take you to a heroin dealer. Yo
u were desperate for an anesthetic. For the first time in your life, you injected the black tar into your veins—like your first friend, Charlie.
You spent days searching for crack. A taxi driver told you it was widely sold in Belgium. You bought a ticket to Brussels. A tattooed Moroccan led you through alleyways and turned to you with a bag of perfect white pieces. You nearly jumped into the sky with joy. Returned to Amsterdam. Smoked in your hotel. Felt earthquakes ripping apart your brain.
You writhed and cried on the floor, digging your nails into your neck, trying to stop the torture by extracting your brain stem. The intensity augmented. You were drooling and screaming. It felt like the government was cutting off the circulation to your brain while simultaneously zapping you with electricity.
This was it. This was your limit. You could fight no more. You fumbled for your suitcase and ran outside. You hailed a cab, sobbing. You gasped at the driver to take you to the airport. Sitting in traffic, you begged the CIA to stop torturing you. I give up! you shouted at the top of your lungs. Leave me alone! I will never smoke crack again! You threw your crack from the window. Calm down, my friend, said the driver, a compassionate Indian with an accent. I know how you feel. I was using once, too.
Outside the airport, a group of concerned strangers surrounded you as you convulsed on the ground. He’s having a heart attack! an American traveler shouted in English. Call an ambulance! An angry security officer dismissed the onlookers. He’s just a drug addict, the officer said with disgust. The American traveler kneeled and said to you: Sir, I’ve called an ambulance; everything is going to be all right.
The torture halted just as the paramedics hooked you up to an electrocardiogram. They could detect no abnormalities. The officer talked to them in Dutch; the paramedics left. You stumbled into the airport and caught a flight to San Diego. You experienced no shocks on the plane, which protected you with its casing of aluminum alloys.
* * *
•
Back home, at your mother’s house, you were sober. A terrible heaviness penetrated your limbs. It was like the ocean swelling inside your bones, your veins, bloating you with toneladas of itself. You felt dead, or rather possessed by death. Perhaps it wasn’t the CIA hurting you all along. Perhaps it was demons, or el Diablo himself.
You looked up at a metal crucifix on the living room wall and it filled you with hope. What a beautiful shape it was: a negation affirming, a yes and a no. You walked over to it. Pulled it down. Carried it into the kitchen. Turned on the stove. Took off your shirt. Pulled tongs from a drawer, used them to hold the crucifix over the fire. Once it was glowing red, you brought it to your bare chest, right over your heart. You screamed as it burned. Kept it there—you wanted it to make a permanent mark. It would protect you. It would negate the evil inside you, and create space for something good. You stared out your mother’s window at the ocean. Near the water, the sky was the color of blood. You smelled your cooking flesh. Pulled the tongs away. Blood dripped from a cross-shaped wound on your chest. You breathed a sigh of relief.
* * *
•
You became a taxi driver. Drunken groups of teenagers regularly stumbled into your cab offering you Ecstasy. You refused, afraid to re-incur the wrath of the CIA. But you wondered how long your sobriety could last with so much temptation.
One day, a fellow taxi driver named Nelson told you about a trip he made to Bangkok, where he slept with beautiful Thai women for twenty dollars apiece. He lamented that he couldn’t do drugs, though, because they weren’t available. Drug dealers are executed over there, he explained. He ran a finger across his neck.
It occurred to you that if you went to Thailand, you would have no temptation whatsoever to do crack, and you would have the best distraction: women. In less than a week, you were on a plane to Bangkok, carrying notebooks filled with lists of the best places for pretty girls. You headed straight to Nana Plaza, a three-story sex complex where you bought slim girls in their twenties with thick legs. They remarked on the horrible cross-shaped scar on your chest. You lied that it was from a motorcycle accident.
You rented a scooter for about five dollars a week, flying through the city, soaking up exotic sights and aromas, past the Temple of the Emerald Buddha with its dazzling murals, past the palatial Wat Arun, which glowed like a golden version of the Ivory Tower in The Neverending Story, past the banks of the Chao Phraya River and the floating markets of Khlong Lat Mayom.
Everybody seemed happy in this country. The vibe was great. When the monk police stopped you for running a red light, they accepted your apologies and cigarettes with amused chuckles. They posed for photographs with you. But it was not long before you grew tired. You couldn’t sleep when prostitutes spent the night, fearing they would rob you of all the cash you had brought. It was exhausting. For the first time in years, you discovered in yourself a desire for emotional intimacy. But the mere thought of love made you so anxious you started drinking whiskey. Intoxicated, you drove your scooter to the beach resort of Pattaya. In the hotel lobby, you observed that the receptionist was attractive. Let’s go to my room, you proposed, your voice slurring.
She asked you where you were from.
I’m…from…Italy!
“Right away, she was all infatuated because I was an Italian man,” you recall. She went to your room and you slept together. Afterward, she wanted money. You felt hurt. I don’t want a prostitute, you explained. I want a girlfriend.
The receptionist thought about it for a few seconds, then agreed. But her haste made you suspicious. She seemed easy, even shallow. After a few weeks, you got tired of Pattaya and the receptionist. You hopped on a train toward the border with China, your backpack stuffed with bottles of Johnnie Walker. One of your happiest memories took place in a mountain village filled with rice paddies, mushroom pastures and bowls of glistening honey. “It was the best honey I ever tasted, like flowers’ perfume,” you say. Around a campfire, you pulled out your whiskey and got the locals drunk. In the morning, you woke up by the embers, where you had passed out. A local woman appeared with your wallet in her hands. You had dropped it on the road. Not a cent was missing.
Wow, thank you! you said, surprised by their honesty.
When you were leaving, all of the townspeople crowded around you, trying to persuade you to stay.
We have a girl for you, a wife! someone said. She’s in the rice fields.
You were tempted, but you felt restless. You traveled east to Vietnam. You joined a group of expats at Saigon’s Duna Hotel, where local girls hunted foreigners with money. Phuong, a twenty-two-year-old with a plain Mongolian face, told you she had moved to the city from a remote rural village when she was a child. She grew up selling gum on the streets. She spoke English; when she learned you were from Mexico, she asked you to teach her Spanish. Phuong had to hear a word only once to remember it. She was enchantingly sharp. Like you, she had a drinking problem. One day, she became belligerent. She stood up at the hotel restaurant, cursing at the expats in incomprehensible Vietnamese. She ran outside, where it was pouring rain. You followed her.
What’s wrong, Phuong? Let’s go back inside; you’re going to get sick!
I want to go home.
You offered to take her on your scooter.
It’s too far. An hour outside town.
I don’t care. I’ll take you.
She hopped on and you sped through the rain to her mother’s modest lakeside house, which was filled with so many mosquitoes they entered your nose with each inhale. You spent the night. In the morning, you were covered in mosquito bites.
You asked Phuong to be your girlfriend. She showed you a picture of a fat gringo who sent her $400 a month. I belong to him, she said sadly. You showed her a picture of me and my sister that you kept in your knapsack. I belong to someone else, too, you said, jokingly, to convince her that you didn’t care. You moved into her mother�
�s house. The two of you kept a pact of sobriety. You cooked and went shopping together. At the market, Phuong picked out the fattest ducks for dinner. She watched with a hawk’s eyes as the sales boy strangled, plucked, skinned, chopped. Once, she spat and screamed when he handed her the plastic bag. With a blush, the boy handed over additional bloody chunks of duck. He tried to keep the liver, she explained. You fell in love.
One day, when you were alone with Phuong’s mother, she looked at you with a somber expression. You a very nice man. But you, you gonna be gone. Gone. Gone, she prophesied. She was crazy. You were never going to leave. You were going to stay here and live happily ever after with Phuong, maybe even start a Mexican restaurant. You had never felt so happy, so comfortable.
Then you discovered that Phuong’s fat old man had come for a visit. You left the city in a fit of jealousy. You say of Phuong’s mother: “It was like she saw into the future.”
* * *
•
You traveled to Kuala Lumpur. You stayed only a few days because whiskey was hard to come by. You jumped onto a train to Cambodia, swimming every day in an abandoned green pool. Once, while riding your scooter in Phnom Penh, an enormous group of prepubescent girls blocked your path on the road, offering oral sex for a few dollars. Disturbed, you headed to the Philippines, where you spent New Year’s alone, drinking, depressed by the festivities. You took a deep breath and decided to go home.
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