by John Burdett
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing. They’ll read you from a distance.”
“You lived here full-time?”
“Certainly. There was no other way. It was the valley of the blind and I owned one good eye.”
I shiver: here live souls who were inches away from total destruction by the ones they most trusted. Aggravated rape of the mind. No one has ever been punished.
Now I notice there is an empty circle in the middle of the compound, the interior of which has been carefully cleaned and scraped and covered with gravel. The Doc indicates with his chin that I should stand there while he and Amos go off behind one of the huts.
After about five minutes a man in denim dungarees appears: a few wisps of white hair that must once have been blond, broken veins in a sensitive north European skin, a posture of deep humility bordering on meekness, a straggly white beard. I would put him in his mid- to late sixties. He looks deeply at me but says nothing. He continues to stare at me from watery blue eyes without speaking while, one by one, other inmates appear from different directions. They emerge from behind the cabins, or perhaps out of them, it’s impossible to say.
There are seven of them, not including Amos or the Doc. In each case they walk slowly, warily, but at the same time with a sense of propriety: this is their space. They are all between the ages of sixty and seventy, dressed similarly in denims, with jungle attitude. Those with hair have grown it long and tied it in a ponytail. Most have not shaved for decades and have acquired long, unkempt spade beards not dissimilar to those of holy men of the Himalayas, but to me they most resemble rednecks from remote hamlets somewhere in Alabama. They stare and wait about ten yards away from me without speaking or moving. Behind them I see the Doc and Amos watching from some distance, leaning against a hut. Now one of them steps forward and starts to sniff me. He steps back after quite a few inhalations in which he seems to be examining my odor. Now another steps forward and does the same thing. One by one they all have a good sniff, then retire to the edge of the circle: I guess identity is established by odor here in the jungle. When I check their faces I see in each the same tormented speculation on some problem of inner space.
There are no words exchanged at all between this close-knit community, but a decision seems to have been collectively taken when the first old man steps forward. He looks into my eyes. Without offering a hand he says, “I’m Ben.”
“I’m Sonchai,” I reply, squinting at them in disbelief. Now they take a single step forward, one by one.
“Casey.”
“Herman.”
“Jason.”
“Jerry.”
“Frank.”
“Mario.”
Ben starts to speak in the wavering voice of someone who rarely uses words at all and seems to be delivering a set speech in a language half forgotten.
“I had a vision. She was a combination of Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. Doesn’t matter if you think of her as Marilyn Loren, or Sophia Monroe, doesn’t matter at all. That’s the way with wormholes. It doesn’t matter, see? My vision encompassed the beauty of both those women, and all the other good women in the world, it was just a perfect, glowing female love, two kinds of woman in one body, and Marilyn Loren was standing at the top of an iron staircase, a kind of platform at the top of the staircase, and I climbed up to it, driven by pure love I climbed up to it, to that platform where she was waiting, then I realized I’d made a slight mistake, she was actually on another platform, a little higher up, but when I got to the next platform I saw I’d made the same mistake, and so on. Over and over. And this obsessed me. Long after they’d done screwing with my head it obsessed me, this pure love that had come to me while they were training me to kill people. But without Marilyn Loren, life had no meaning for me—none at all. She was the only thing left in my head that I had put there myself. It took the Doc to explain that I’d gotten stuck in infinity. In his system infinity is a thing you can get stuck in. Just as your body can get stuck in a doorway, so your mind gets stuck by—” He stops himself, begins again. “It turned out that Marilyn Loren was my wormhole. That was the living agony at the center of the corpse.”
He steps back to the edge of the circle to let a brother step forward.
“Hi, I’m Casey.” His hair is tied back with a piece of string and his Amish beard extends to the center of his chest. “I loved dogs, so they made me kill one, slowly, when I was on acid,” he says, tears streaming down his face and wetting his beard. “That’s how they got me. Dogs were my wormhole. I killed lots of people, too, but only after they made me kill the dog.”
Another steps forward. “Hello, I’m Jason. Want to know why I stayed in the body? I saw this was not life, but death. This sojourn in the body is death. So why be in a hurry to die? We’ll all soon be free anyway. But I can’t stand to be with people who don’t know they’re dead. It fucks my head up so bad, I have to run away. Do you know you’re dead? I can’t tell. You kind of look like you do and you look like you don’t, both at the same time.”
One by one they step forward to deliver their harrowing stories, then stand back. Now it is my turn to speak.
“I’m just a beginner here,” I say, almost paralyzed by the sense of weirdness. “I’ve come to learn. I would like to know more.”
This gambit has a strange effect on the group. They stare and stare at me as if I’m crazy and they scratch their heads. Finally, Ben says, “Really?”
“Yes,” I say. “Really.”
Small talk has no place here. It seems I’ve said something with serious implications that I cannot myself unravel. They frown and study me. When discomfort makes me walk around the circle holding my chin, trying to come to terms with the weirdness of the camp, they follow me with their eyes and hold their chins, as if I am a stage act. As if I have an answer. I finally exclaim, “Will you stop staring at me, please?”
Instantly they drop their eyes, as if ashamed of themselves. “We’re sorry,” Ben says. “See, for us you’re something very special.”
“Yep,” another agrees. “Very special.”
General murmurs of agreement.
“Would you mind telling me why?”
“ ’Cause you said you wanted to learn. Nobody else ever said that to us. Anyone who visited didn’t want to know scat—they just wanted to get the hell out.”
At this they all nod their heads gravely.
“What is a wormhole?”
The question has the effect of making them laugh and grin. “Didn’t the Doc tell you?” Ben asks.
“No, the Doc didn’t tell me.”
“Well he darn well should have,” another says.
“Doc’s messin’ with your head if he didn’t tell you.”
“So why don’t you tell me?”
Ben scratches his head. “For us, it’s not verbal.” More nods of agreement. “No way a man with an active wormhole can talk about it.”
“And we all got them.”
“Even the Doc.”
“Even you, probably, or you wouldn’t have come.”
“That’s right. And you sure wouldn’t want to learn from us if you didn’t have your own wormhole.”
Silence. I wonder where Dr. Christmas Bride has hidden himself. The men speak in mutters inaudible to me, then Ben steps forward.
“We can’t explain wormholes, but we can show you the original.”
“Right,” they agree in a mumble.
“We call it the Great Wormhole, but it’s not really.”
“Right. The Great Wormhole is life on earth.”
“But that’s too big an idea for us. So we stop the investigation at our great wormhole, even though in reality it’s only local to us.”
“Exactly.”
Now I’ve lost the plot entirely—or they have. “So,” I say, “let’s go. Let’s go find the Great Wormhole.”
“Really?” Ben says.
“Sure,” I say.
They mumble together some m
ore in their impenetrable dialect. “We’re scared it might totally freak you out,” Ben explains. “They demand that I warn you it might freak you out. Not the same as the way it freaks us out, but just the same…”
“I’ll take my chances. My head and I have been through a lot together.”
This makes them chuckle.
“He says his head and him have been through a lot together.”
Now they are all looking at me fondly and chuckling.
Without another word Ben leads me to one of the huts at the far end of the compound. It is just about intact, although it looks as if it might succumb to the jungle within a year. Above the door someone has painted in crude letters the legend Great Wormhole. Underneath are the words Museum of American War Atrocities. I stop to stare at Ben.
“We copied the one in Saigon,” Ben explains. “All the exhibits are from original pictures, but we couldn’t reproduce the glass jars with ground stoppers they keep the Agent Orange fetuses in, so we just took photographs. It’s pretty much a faithful reproduction—except for the name, of course. You go to Saigon now, it’s called the War Remnants Museum.” He pauses before entering. With a gesture of resignation, as if to say, Here, you might as well know it all, he slips a hand into an inside pocket and takes out a very worn snapshot. “The Doc encourages each of us to carry one, so we can remember who we’re not anymore. He keeps a snapshot of himself just the same.”
There are plenty of creases in it and the color has faded, but it is still possible to recognize the muscular and rather beautiful young man with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, holding an M-16 and looking stoned. He is not in uniform, however; his magnificent shoulders and biceps are left bare except for the straps of his dungarees.
“Special Forces?”
He stares at me with such stress that I wonder if he is going to explode. Then he starts to relax again. “Yeah, that’s right. I was the kind who volunteered for everything. Volunteered once too often. Special Forces, then MKUltra. Ultra liked to recruit from Special Forces. Never thought it would be my head that caved, though. Never thought Uncle Sam himself would do that to me.”
His features go through a complex rolling ritual that ends with an expression of psychotic wonder. It is a war, certainly, that is playing across his face and, I suppose, the rest of his body, nerves tensing and relaxing, the left fighting the right, one side of his face malevolent, the other retaining the gentle resignation of old age. Old age wins. The violence subsides. It was as if I could experience his demons, watch them do battle with angels, lose the fight, and slink away: Armageddon shrunk to a few ivory cells in one man’s brain. Now he looks up at me.
“We can go in now. I’m okay with it now. I think.”
22
Memory, of course, is notorious for its power to deceive. Nevertheless, I am certain Ben and his brothers have faithfully reproduced the museum that I first visited in Saigon with my mother, Nong, all those years ago. Walking ramrod straight, and a little too fast, Ben takes me to what I suppose is his favorite exhibit: a photograph of a giant thousand-gallon tank of Agent Orange, which carries the legend The Giant Purple People Eater.
“This is where we turned Nazi,” Ben announces loudly. He has become suddenly officious, a different person entirely; stress works all his features. His words pierce the somnambulant state I seem to have slipped into. “Did you know we had to refine napalm to make it better stick to human skin? It stuck especially well to the tender skin of young children.”
“No,” I hear myself saying, as if underwater. “No, I did not know that.”
A kind of panic overcomes him, like someone who suffers from claustrophobia. He marches us through the rest of the exhibits at a fast walking pace—the My Lai massacre; victims of Agent Orange; the picture I saw on my first visit with Nong all those years ago (exactly as I remembered: an athletic-looking GI, an M-16 in his left hand, his right holding the torso of an enemy fighter, which is hardly more than skin plus head hanging upside down; the GI is laughing hysterically).
Now Ben is glaring at me. I am put in mind of crazies who throw tantrums for no apparent reason: a sudden resurgence of uncontrollable rage waiting for a trigger.
“You gotta blow them away, you have no choice. You can’t be who you are and let them be who they are. It don’t work. Someone has to die.” He raises his voice again, making it crack. “We coulda won, you know?”
“Won what, the genocide?”
He blinks rapidly. “Yeah. The genocide. Why not? It’s only the first time you kill that you feel bad.” He stamps his foot. “So, why didn’t we just drop the Bomb on Hanoi?” He stares at me, distraught. “I could have been standing here a winner, instead of a loser.”
I am afraid of him, this crazy old man, so I say nothing. The suffering of a crazy possesses an unnerving authenticity that can make you feel like a fraud in your fragile sanity. Is it because we know deep down that a divided mind is perhaps the only honest reaction to a cleft world? Sorry, R, these are jungle thoughts, I’ll be okay once I’m out of here.
Or will I? There’s an atmosphere of finality in the camp that creeps up on you, as if this were the hidden endgame I have been postponing all these years.
A groan starts somewhere deep in Ben’s chest, and ends with a scream. “You trying to fuck with my head, boy? You trying to fuck me up all over again? We weren’t supposed to lose.” Now he weeps. “We could have had a victory parade just like after World War Two. The whole of New York would have turned out to honor us.”
Now I cannot stand any more. I am pulling him toward the exit by grabbing the strap of his dungarees. He forces a halt in front of the “Napalm Girl,” who is running naked toward the camera, her body burning with the chemical that has stuck to her. Ben bursts into tears. Now he is running toward the exit. I race after him, but when I pull open the door of the hut, there is no sign of him.
I have to go back in. I stop in front of a photograph of an eighty-five-year-old woman in a wheelchair leading ten thousand people in a march from Berkeley to Oakland on November 25, 1965; she carries a banner with the legend My Son Died in Vain, Don’t Go to War, Go to Prison. Black-and-white pix of marches and demonstrations from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, France, Britain, the USSR. Now I see close-ups of Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn, two helicopter pilots raised to the level of superheroes: they saved the lives of ten Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. In November 1965, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison, and Alice Herz soaked themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire outside U.S. government buildings. Here is the wall of the intellectuals, led by Bertrand Russell of the U.K., giving finely articulated reasons why the war must end. A telegram sent by Ho Chi Minh to “American Friends” on the occasion of 1968 New Year’s. Finally, a distraught young woman, on her knees, weeps over the dead body of a fellow student at Kent State University.
The one that grabs me the most, though, is a highly colored, deliberately amateurish poster by vets who opposed the war: Don’t go, the U.S. Government will turn you into a psychopath.
—
Outside the hut it has started to rain with the sudden violence of the tropics. I stand in the downpour and shiver. Now a tall, wild figure, also without protection from the rain, appears from behind one of the other huts, cupping a lighted cigarette.
“Ben flipped, didn’t he? Captain America took over, I suppose? You must forgive him—and forgive me, too,” he says. “I hope you understand why we had to do that?” He gives a good strong pull on the Camel.
“What is a wormhole?”
“I’ll tell you in the truck on the way back. The point was that you should see where everyone is coming from.”
“Everyone?”
He looks at me. “Yes. The Asset included.”
23
I follow Bride down a narrow path through the jungle opposite the main entrance. We stop on the edge of a clearing where crops have been grown in the past, but not recently: another long hut on blocks, but witho
ut windows and with locks more serious than those on the other huts. The Doctor points at it: “That was my lab, for four decades.” He shakes his head. “Four decades. The first ten years are about adaptation, organization, hierarchy, the sophistication of food gathering and preparation and water retrieval. After that people need something beyond mere survival. And that’s normal people who haven’t been severely damaged. In the Middle Ages in Europe nearly half the year was taken up with religious holidays, which often degenerated into orgies. We needed a structure, d’you see? But what? There were no examples we could use from modern times. Or even medieval times. Or even ancient Roman times.” As he ticks off the millennia he studies my face, searching for the light of understanding and finding none.
“One had to reach right back to the very wellsprings of the human psyche.”
“Eleusis?” I ask.
He gives a tolerant smile. “A good guess and, I confess, the thought crossed my mind. But you have to remember ancient Greece was an upstart civilization patched together with half-understood philosophies stolen from Egypt and Persia. Greece was the New World of the time, the older cultures laughed with contempt at the superficiality of clowns like Plato.”
He leads me from the hut to a footpath, where we surprise Amos of the big hair. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as we emerged. He was standing behind a tree. The tree was too thin for his hair, though. Now he comes out, smiling, as if trying to pretend he wasn’t spying. Dr. Bride grins.
“See what I mean about espionage?” He jerks a chin at the black man. “Amos is an artist. He’s excited that you’re about to witness his masterpieces—and he’s also shy. Is that not so, Amos, my dear friend?”