The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  He did a circuit of the deck, but there was still no sign of the boss. He doubled back.

  There. Through the porthole of the room adjacent to his own, he watched as the boss rifled through his belongings. Found it: his spare pistol. But too late, too late. The boss was on the floor. How did he end up there? Too late, too late. The butt of the revolver smashed his skull. Again and again. Until he was still.

  There was a break in the rail near the cabins, closed only by a low-slung chain, and it was here that Vladimir pitched the bodies overboard.

  He leaned over the rail, caught a last glimpse of the boss’s moon face before it slipped beneath the waves.

  Vladimir headed back to the cabins, got some stuff together. As the steamer slipped into Honolulu Bay, he swam for it.

  20

  A beard can take a long time to grow, as I was finding out.

  The Swami, like most holy men, was renowned for his beard—long, grey and streaked with his original dark colouring. Actually more like a wizard than a guru, I used to think, the impression reinforced by the books left lying around, on the cover of which the Swami habitually stood in his long grey robes, arms outstretched, as if about to cast a spell.

  He said, “follow me” and they did, they did. Maybe because of those books he was always standing wizard-like in my imagination as he said it and all those grown-ups—Ma, Samat, all of them—would be lying face-down at his feet, out of the picture, as it were, and there would only be him, standing, arms outstretched in the silence of the auditorium.

  This never actually happened, as far as I’m aware—in Hyderabad, for example, he tended to lecture from a stage with the sannyasins gathered cross-legged around him—but as a wee one I definitely pictured him more as a magician, casting a spell on the gathered masses, and I still think this was a more accurate picture. But not in a bad way—didn’t Jesus, too, use magic to demonstrate his divinity?

  But when I was a young bug, theological questions were of little interest to me. More importantly, I wanted to know how old he was when he grew his beard and how he learned his magic.

  Little is known about the Swami’s early years—born to a middle-class Indian family, he left for the big city at eighteen to study philosophy. Did he already have his beard then, I wondered? In my mind’s eye, the youthful Swami looked like one of the younger hippies who was already prematurely bald (like the Swami?) and growing a wispy goatee to compensate (like the Swami?). Was it possible, even, to have magic without a beard? Of course! Look at Harry Potter and his friends. So the young Swami morphed into Harry in my imaginings, only kind of Indian, but with the same round-rimmed glasses, which would have probably suited the young philosophy student at Bengal University in the 1980s.

  He had a glum time, from what I could gather. “A darkness descended,” he said. “I doubted everything.” He would lie in his room for days, full of questions but no answers, terrified he was losing his mind. He lost his appetite, had splitting headaches. He suffered like this for almost a year, until even the darkness and the pain began to grow distant. Maybe life, as he understood it, itself. “I was lying there quite still,” he said, “yet drawing further and further away.” Until one night he woke up, and there it was: “I had arrived at a place that had no purchase upon the rocks of our world—the material, cultural, psychological, spiritual laws I had lived by had no meaning here—yet, nevertheless, it existed in a form that was real, hyper-real, the only reality.” He said it was not as if he had found God, rather that he had lost himself and God was all that remained.

  “Any good?” asked Kobro. He meant the book he had got for me on the life of the Swami. I looked up from it.

  “Alright.”

  “Where you at?” He peered over my shoulder, full of his usual bonhomie. “Ah, the breakdown.”

  I looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, enlightenment to you. To me it’s a classic depressive episode followed by a subsequent hypomanic phase, which then bottomed out, for a while, anyway. It’s my hunch it hit him again in the States, which could explain a thing or two, eh?”

  Fuck you, I thought, but assumed my best blank expression.

  “Of course, Indian culture,” he continued, excited by the sound of his own voice, “has no real conception of mental illness, at least not in the same way as the West. It’s actually ironic that the Swami was one of the first to integrate the likes of Freud and Jung into his act. Maybe he knew more than he was letting on?” He looked at me for reaction, got none. “You know, I sometimes wonder if the whole Indian tradition of meditation and enlightenment—consider that word for a moment: en-light-enment—grew out of holy men from Buddha onwards who were actually manic depressives desperate to clamber out of the dark hole they had found themselves in. It kind of makes sense, dontchathink?”

  “Or maybe depression, if that’s what it is,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “is God’s way of coming into our lives, like the Swami said.”

  “So you do believe in God then, Vereesh?” He was wearing a cheeky smile.

  “God?” I said. “I was talking about what the Swami said.”

  “But come on,” he said. “You were studying theology, you must have some views.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have some views.”

  “About the Swami?”

  I shrugged. “He certainly seemed to scare a lot of people, but . . . I was too young for that. I . . . I just know what I’ve read. That’s why I signed up for the course, I guess. Because . . . I wanted to find out more, about everything. You took sannyas, you should know—the Swami talked about all sorts in his teaching: Jesus, the Buddha, Taoism. I wanted to find out more about them. What do I believe?” I finally looked him in the eye. “I don’t know what I believe. I didn’t before all . . . ” I looked around the kitchen, “all this happened. And I certainly don’t now.”

  Kobro nodded. “Wise kid. The world has too many people who think they have all the answers.” He saw my look. “And I guess I’m no different,” he said. “We all like a bit of certainty in our lives, don’t we?”

  “Magda said you work for the World Health . . . ”

  “WHO, yeah, that’s right.”

  “I’ve got some questions.” He gave me a wry smile.

  “Oh really? How about a quid pro quo?”

  I shrugged.

  “Go on,” he said. “Fire away.”

  “You said we, carriers I mean, are a ‘problem’ the other day. Why?”

  He sat back, crossed his hands over his chest, looking perplexed. “You mean apart from how fucking difficult it is to beat diseases that lie dormant over generations? What a mockery it makes of traditional surveillance strategies?”

  I shook my head. “That will always be a problem. Disease has always evolved. New ones come along. AIDS, bird flu, Ebola. I mean—I know why I might be a threat—but I’m . . . ” I hated the word, “special. What I’ve got. Akka, Magda, they’re not carrying anything as bad, anything as dangerous, are they?”

  “Have they told you?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “Well, I’ll be discreet, a gentleman. I’m in England now, right? But no, they’re not.”

  “So why are they in hiding?”

  “Did they tell you anything about how they ended up here?” I shook my head.

  “Did Akka . . . ” we both looked outside to where the bird-like old lady was weeding the flower bed and muttering to herself, “. . . mention the two Finnish cops she took out? One of them was so badly injured she was invalided out of service.

  “You know better than I do what’s going on inside you, Vereesh, what these bugs do to your thinking, your behaviour, your powers of perception, performance. What we’re dealing with, the weird shit that’s going on in your biology that both excites us—the medical, the scientific, the political establishment, that is—and scares the bejesus out of us.

  “Your potential is, as yet, largely unexplored. We’ve—they’ve—managed to get a
hold of a handful of you over the years, but . . . ” He waved his hand.

  “Josh?” I said. He shook his head.

  “You know,” he said, still watching Akka, “how these days anything seems to have become routine? Torture, head chopping, Guantanamo . . . whatever. Well, kid, it was always like that. We just didn’t talk about it. It was our dirty secret. Nine-eleven blew the lid off, that’s all. In a way it was a relief.” He shrugged. “Forced some of us to choose what side we were on.” He looked at me. “And I chose yours. So don’t be such an unappreciative prick, okay? Even though I know it’s in your genes.” He winked. “Now, tell me about your mother.”

  You seemed so shrunken, Ma, at the bus station, pressing the mala into my hand. Your mala. Now mine. And I was just keen to get going.

  “She’s an old hippy,” I said. “From America, California, I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  I shrugged. “She never talked much about the past. Her dad worked in the real estate business, I think, something like that.”

  “What was her surname?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  Kobro rolled his eyes. “It’s easier that way,” he said. “To track.”

  “Track?”

  “Track back, through her genes. If she was asymptomatic, it had to come from somewhere—how long the virus has lain low.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know her surname. Just her sannyas name.”

  “You mean you knew her all those years and you don’t know her surname?” He looked incredulous.

  “Never thought to ask,” I said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “All that time? What about your grandparents? Her siblings? Are you levelling with me, kid?”

  “Fuck off!” I slammed the book down. “Fuck you! What do you know about my life?”

  “Hey, man.” He stepped back, raised his hands. “Not much, that’s why I was asking.”

  “You were a sannyasin,” I said, getting up, “or so you said. You know what it’s like—all those people, desperate for a new life. Why the fuck would they want to dwell on the past? That’s what they got into the Swami to escape!”

  Kobro edged further back. Although he was bigger, bulkier than me, I began to feel a kind of uncoiling rage I could only just control. I realised: it was my thing, my thing through me.

  “What is it you want from us?” I said. “How do we know you are who you say you are? Did you really ‘choose’ us like you said or are you in it for something, for someone else?”

  He backed further away, against the edge of the half-open door.

  I thought I could hear my heart beating until I realised that the quickening two-step was not mine but his. His heart beating in my ears—I could hear his breathing too, the tremor of his lungs. His beating and his breathing: the percussion of a cornered animal.

  You call yourself human, I thought, this frightened confection of flesh and plastic, animal and artificial fibre, street stink and sweat, you call yourself human, but what are you, except an animal that puts on airs?

  I stepped inside his halo, the sheen of senses that separated Kobro from the world. Decanted—the office, static from old computers, Indian gum, photocopier chemicals, an office, any office. We were eye-to-eye, nose to face mask.

  “What do you want from us?” I asked.

  “Vereesh.” It was Magda, her voice like the old Magda, not my new confidante. I felt her behind me.

  I turned slowly, wary of Magda, yet part of me still trained on Kobro.

  I meant him no harm exactly, but part of me was still high on the drug, the adrenalin, the glorious darkening, the . . . delight of destruction.

  There it was, in me: destroyer of worlds.

  “What is . . . that?” I meant the fluorescent plastic pistol Magda was pointing at me that looked like an oversized child’s toy.

  Maybe she sensed the return of the old Vereesh, because her face slackened, although her aim did not.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “What?”

  “How you got here?”

  I shook my head. “I thought,” I said, “maybe a truck . . . ”

  “Taser,” she said. “Ten thousand volts. So be a good baby boy. The doctor is on our side.”

  21

  I tried to keep the soles of my feet flat and centred, imagined a gleaming steel pin running clean through my arches and sunk into the cool linoleum.

  I closed my eyes, straightened my spine, tucked my tailbone in. Began to breathe through my nose, draw the air down.

  The first, shallow breaths accounted for the blossoming of my chest. Here was the present, the reality, with all its sharpness, worry, panic, fear. I could feel it in the rawness of my throat, my cluttered mind; thoughts, visions, memories crowding out the deeper quiet I was looking for. This was always the hardest part: consciousness clinging to its own illusion like an actor that can’t get out of character.

  My solar plexus ballooned, tugging me further down. That was the third chakra, willpower. I let it drag me into the deeper, darker depths.

  I could hear my breathing now. Longer, slower, powered by my middle. Thought began to dissipate. I imagined my buzzing consciousness submerging into a milky white pool.

  Breath became all. The long breath that filled me up, oxygenating my blood, charging my heart. The breath and my body, becoming centred now at my belly.

  Full now, my belly full with breath. The sacral chakra, the emotional bowl, filling up with the stuff of life. My groin began to move with the rhythm of the long, the longest breath. Because that was also where sex was.

  I began to sway, my hands knocking against my sides. I let the longest breath roll up through my body and out of my mouth. Then did it again, my limbs beginning to loosen, my arms starting to swing.

  My body became like a bellows, the breath rolling in and out of me with each pendulum sweep of my arms.

  Now. It was now. The unconscious, subconscious, whatever it was, whatever it was that I had released, drew the spikes from my arches and my feet were free.

  I began to move.

  I lifted up one foot, laid it down. Then the next, my legs bent, my body slumped, my arms swinging. I began pacing on the spot to a silent rhythm.

  Sunk into the warm red flesh of my body, submerged in the milky pool of my soul. Body and soul combined, joined in movement.

  Which began to pick up pace.

  My feet slapped upon the tiles, knees jabbing back up. Here he came. Here came the caveman.

  Like it always was, like it always will be. Late at night, around the fire. Doing the caveman, crazy on mushrooms, jabbering revelations, impersonating animals, revisiting great feats, just fucking freaking out.

  I swirled around the room, my arms doing windmills. Then I bounced up and down like a frog. I jumped up, straight up and threw my arms back.

  Here came the caveman—he began a kind of jig then fell onto his back. He waggled his legs in the air.

  Now he was back on his feet, pumping his pelvis in time to the beat of his breath, which was growing more rapid by the moment. Faster, faster, his whole body focussed on pumping more oxygen.

  This was how it was, how it always will be deep inside you.

  The Swami was to enlightenment what McDonalds was to fast food. And his Big Mac was The Dance.

  Gone was the tyranny of silence, yoga’s ever more tortuous contortions. The long, monotonous Om. The Dance was designed specifically for Westerners, its précis simple: their lives were filled with so much crap, so much noise, that before they could ever be ready to reach enlightenment they had to outrun their mind, tire their body to the extent that at the moment they STOPPED . . .

  They might, just might, for a moment, glimpse the emptiness, the existential absence that was at the heart of enlightenment, Nirvana here on earth.

  And if they were really lucky or disciplined or just special—they might manage to hold on to it, hold on to that nothingness, which was very Zen,
and therefore very Swami.

  Working with Westerners was one of the reasons the Swami became such a bogeyman, the personification of the sinister, exploitative cult leader. He was clearly only after their money, as his fleet of Mercedes so amply illustrated. But, as ever, the Swami had it down pat on that too—what nonsense it was to think that the poor, who constituted most of his countrymen, could ever reach enlightenment!

  On the contrary, if Westerners needed shaking from their earthly preoccupations, this was nothing next to the insistent nag of an empty belly, worrying about how you were going to pay for the treatment of a sick child.

  Indeed, what were children themselves but a burden, a barrier to self-knowledge, fulfilment? Let the poor breed more hands for their farm, a pension for their old age. Enlightenment is about unbecoming, not breeding. Wasn’t the Buddha, after all, a prince?

  So the wealthy danced, the wealthy jigged, their way to Nirvana.

  Part workout, part hyperventilation, The Dance cleared the pores and cleansed the soul, so they said, and as I sat there I felt the clarity, the black of the bug in me, the white that I liked to think of as my humanity. But it was actually all of me. Yin and Yang spun, became one, transformed into a kind of dirty grey, then a foggy white. Now, silver. Silver is what I was, like jewellery, like steel.

  The sobbing seeped into my reverie. Low, insistent. I opened my eyes. It was coming from somewhere in the house. Upstairs, maybe. I uncrossed my legs, stripped off my sweat-heavy t-shirt, boxer shorts. Reached into the bowl and splashed the cold water over my face, wiped myself down.

  I stood up, wary of moving too quickly—I almost fainted once—and looked at myself in the mirror that was propped up against some boxes in the otherwise empty spare room. The beard seemed to extenuate my scrawny nakedness. I looked like some kind of hermit, living in a hole. A holy man or a madman. A hippy or a Muslim. But I didn’t look like me. And maybe that was a good thing. I was ready for CCTV.