by Bapsy Jain
But the difficult thing — and the point Lucky kept coming back to — was the idea of how a man with an aversion to technology would act. That thought intrigued her. It had to narrow down his options.
Lucky folded her hands and rested her chin on her knuckles. She thought about the Monty Hall problem. If you knew where someone wasn’t, you increased the odds of knowing where they were. Really, the odds were best if you looked where he had never been and where nobody thought he was. Lucky sat bolt upright. She looked at the map. What was the least likely place for him to be? In Mumbai? At first, she had dismissed the idea, but maybe it had merit after all. Coleman had said Lobsang was based mainly in Mumbai. It was easy to hide in Mumbai, and everyone seemed to know somebody there. It would be easy to hide in a densely populated area — and Mumbai certainly was that. Somehow, though, she felt he was not in Mumbai. Too much technology. She slumped, defeated, and thinking of Shanti saying, “When the world goes upside down, you need to stand on your head.” Instead, Lucky went to lunch.
When she returned, she found Coleman sitting on her desk, considering the volume of Whitman.
“Hello…Clevis.”
“Afternoon, Boyce.” Coleman replied. He did not look up. “Knew you were eccentric. Didn’t think you were subversive.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I hear the carpenter singing. The mason singing, the boatman singing, the woodcutter singing. Singing with open mouths their strong, melodious songs. Tell me, Boyce, have you ever heard anyone sing without their mouth open?”
She looked up, puzzled.
“Didn’t think so. Some editor should have struck that line.”
“I like poetry,” Lucky replied. “Mark it down as one of my vices. And if I wasn’t subversive you wouldn’t have hired me.”
“Done and done. And you have no idea how right you are about that. Whitman was gay, did you know that? He and his robust young friends partying through the night. You know why people read books, Boyce?”
“To learn?”
“There you go being idealistic again. And naïve. Have to wean you off that. Whitman knew. Try this one.” She turned back a few pages. “I myself often think I know little or nothing of my real life. There. Ignorance. That’s why people read, Boyce. They are ignorant of their real life. Do you think books can make people sing, Boyce?”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me no.”
“Precisely. You were going to argue that books could teach you music, but that’s not the same thing. You know what makes people sing? Happiness? Contentment? That’s a lot of crap. What was it Maya Angelou wrote? Why does the caged bird sing? Birds sing to attract mates. And people? People sing because they are blissfully ignorant.”
“Perhaps people sing for different reasons?”
Coleman frowned, then looked back at the book. He idly flipped pages. “We make people sing, Boyce. You and I. The leaders of this sorry pack. We can make them happy and we can make them sad. We can make them work like bees in a hive or riot in the streets in protest. And the beauty of it all is that we yank the chains and they think it’s their idea. Have you heard this one?
To find a new unthought of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth! To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
“What do you make of that — A new un-thought? What the hell is that?”
“He said ‘unthought-of.’ He was talking about the nonchalance —”
“Or this….”
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
“Something in a trance? He’s got to be mad! Boyce! Hear this one….”
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
“To drive free! To love! To dash reckless! To court destruction! He was a sadist, of sorts.”
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
“To feed the remainder of life with one brief hour of fullness and freedom! With one hour of madness and joy! Was the man prescient, or what, Boyce?”
“I find it rather amusing.”
“Amusing? In what way?”
“In the same way that all fanatics are amusing. Nature has no power —”
“Who said anything about nature, Boyce? He’s talking about television. Of course nature can’t satisfy our demands. That’s why men invented technology. If nature were all that great, we’d still be running around in skins and eating whatever could be dug, picked, snared, clubbed, or shot with a bow and arrow. Man and machine were made for each other. To cast off this husk of a body. Why, in one hour of television you can have the experience of a lifetime. Think of it, Boyce, the loser on the street — Whitman’s fishermen and housewives and stonecutters and whatnot — for an hour they can be anybody! They can sleep with impossibly beautiful people, visit exotic places, fly, dream, live! Thoreau said, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ We, Boyce, the upper crust, we relieve them of their misery. We’ve done more for mankind in the past fifty years than was done in all the preceding millennia. How can real-life compare with what we offer? Ordinary life is — or was — as Shakespeare would say, ‘a fishmonger’s wife.’ We offer sex with a supermodel.”
Lucky looked out the window.
As if he read her mind, Coleman got up and walked around the desk. “People are happy because of us.” He licked his lips. “We give them food and shelter and entertainment. What else is there? For a few hours, they can be anybody. Indiana Jones! Luke Skywalker! Batman! Superman! Think of it! A magic carpet ride to anywhere, for free, right in the comfort of their homes! You wouldn’t want to mess with that, would you, Boyce?” There was a trace of menace in his voice. Coleman snapped the book shut.
“No sir,” she said.
“Yes, I know all about you. And your prison work, your yoga, your rather endearing ability to know a little bit about everything. And nothing at all about what really matters.”
“What matters?”
“Yes.” Coleman stood up and went to the window. “What matters? How long has television been around, Boyce?”
“Farnsworth, 1927.”
“BBC began broadcasting in 1937. NBC in 1939. If we allow, say, twenty years for the diffusion of the technology to reach a saturation level at which it could have a real impact, then in the West we have had, say, five or six generations that have grown up on it.”
“That sounds about right.”
“What do you know about McClintock’s Constant?”
“He was a molecular biologist.”
“She. She postulated that knowledge becomes genetically encoded in seventeen generations. Fruit flies taught for seventeen generations will spontaneously acquire that behavior without training in the eighteenth. Knowledge itself can act as a kind of transposon.”
“A what?”
“A transposon — a gene that jumps around in DNA. Brings me back to the time when I was a boy graduating from high school.”
“And your point is?”
“You have a colorful past, Miss Boyce. A climber. A shark in business. A society marriage. A few scrapes with the law. Perhaps I’ve misjudged you.”
Lucky looked out the window, then back at Coleman. “How so?”
“Have you any interest in politics, Boyce?”
“I suppose everybody has thought about running for office.”
“I’m not talking about running for office,” Coleman snapped. “Any jackass can run for office. I’m talking about politics. Real politics, Boyce, played the old-fashioned way.”
“And which way is that?”
“Would you lie to the press if I asked you to?” Lucky started to speak but Coleman held up his hand. “If I said it was important. If I said it was an issue of national security?”
> “No sir.”
“Would you plant an illegal wiretap?”
Lucky shook her head.
“Would you hack into someone’s computer?”
“No sir.”
“Would you plant evidence on a man to advance your cause and hurt his? If you knew your cause to be just?”
“Wouldn’t that go against —”
“Fair play? That’s what I mean, Boyce. When it comes to causes, there is no fair play. Would you sleep with a man to gain his confidence?”
Lucky’s eyes bulged. She stammered, “Of…of…of course not.”
“Would you kill a man without judicial review if he was a clear and present threat to your nation?”
Lucky hesitated.
“That’s what I wanted to know,” Coleman said. “If you would act decisively for a cause and without hesitation.”
Lucky’s eyes were suddenly dry and irritated. She blinked, but no moisture came. She said, “In Vietnam, in 1968, a U.S. Army Major, Phil Cannella, supposedly told a reporter that we had to destroy the village of Ben Tre in order to save it. Isn’t that what you are asking? That I should destroy the values I hold dear in order to save them for others? What sense does that make?”
Coleman smiled. “According to McClintock, we have twelve generations to go before people stop thinking for themselves entirely. Won’t that be marvelous? Think about it. There will be a ruling class, an intelligentsia to think for them. They will rule benevolently, but firmly. Everyone will be better off. Especially, those at the top of the food chain. In politics, Boyce, there are two kinds of people. Those who play the game and those who read the rules. Those with their noses in the rule book are generally taken for fools and left in the dust, or worse. Are you certain you don’t want to play the game?”
“Is this some sort of a joke?” Lucky asked.
Coleman smiled. “Of course it’s a joke. Just a little test of integrity I give all my people. Don’t worry, you’ve passed.” He stood up to leave, crossed the office, but paused at the door. “People have been praying for world peace for generations,” he said. “Only — until now, we never understood how to make that happen. Once people are properly domesticated, then and only then will we have world peace. I’d like to think that my great-great-great-something-or-others might grow up in that kind of world. How about you?”
“I can’t even visualize that,” Lucky said.
Coleman shook his head. “Work on that. You have to be well prepared for the meeting this afternoon.”
When he was gone, Lucky fixed a cup of chai and went to the window. The day was hot and humid, the air hazy. Across the Potomac was Arlington, and to the south, Alexandria. This was all Civil War country. Strange, Lucky thought, to think of Americans fighting each other, much as Indians did during the days following the Partition. More than half a million men died in that war. Mostly, Lucky noted, of disease.
She returned to her desk and opened the volume of Sun Tzu. Choosing a page at random, she read: Good warriors cause others to come to them. They do not go to others. Now, there was a possibility that nobody had seriously considered. Maybe there was a way — besides a disease or a poison or necessary piece of machinery — maybe there was a way to make Lobsang come forward, come up for air, come to them with a request. Wouldn’t that be a corker? he thought. But what would he want?
The way to reach Lobsang was to find out what he wanted. But what does a man who has renounced the world want? That, Lucky realized, was the one thing Coleman had never said: What does this Lobsang want? He had something of great value, and he had to know that. Why, then, wouldn’t he share it with the world? Wasn’t that what any normal person would do?
Lucky opened a file on psychological forensics—case studies as varied as Jack the Ripper, D.B. Cooper, Shakespeare, Che Guevara, Joan of Arc, and Saddam Hussein. There were many enigmatic people whose motives were easier seen posthumously than while they were alive. All the deduction required was certain basic facts from which conflicting possibilities could be sorted out. These were:
Circumstances of birth
Family life
Physical health
Education
Employment
Life experiences
The date of birth told you someone’s age, and the maternal and paternal details of the circumstances of birth provided information on the environment the child would have been likely subjected to — as well as the issues they would have had to confront during their formative years. Age progression was unavoidable, and although class could change, there were certain facts of class, which tended to leave signatures — habits of speech, diet, clothing, even habits of thought. Not to mention the number of siblings and the order of birth.
Physical health also said a great deal about a person’s potential for action. For example, some historians’ claim that Joan of Arc had to be a man was based on the assumption that no woman could ride, wield a sword, or command soldiers, as Joan had. On the other hand, there was nothing concrete to rule out that Joan was a woman — provided that she was in excellent health. Thus, overall health was an important key to understanding behavior.
Education. Almost all those who contended that Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare did so on the grounds that his education was not considered sufficient to support such an ambitious body of work. On its surface, this was a good argument. But when one considered other factors, and the number of factual and historical errors in Shakespeare’s work, the reverse became evident. It was not his education that enabled his work but his upbringing and life’s experiences. In reality, his lack of advanced education hindered his work, as the upper class almost always appeals to an innate superiority when attempting to discredit upstart rivals from the lower classes.
Employment. That was easy to trace for any individual.
The last of the six factors was life experience. Would it be possible to understand Mother Teresa or Che Guevara or Mahatma Gandhi without understanding the events that triggered their devotion to their causes? Sleuths cited military experience as a factor in D.B. Cooper’s selection of parachutes. But the real question — the one no one could answer — was: what prompted a man to risk his life for a suitcase full of $100 bills? Was he trying, as some argued, to fund a revolutionary organization? By the same token, Gandhi, who was born into a wealthy family, renounced wealth as a hindrance to his idealistic goals. Thus, opposite behaviors might be triggered by similar events. What was necessary was to understand how the person interpreted those events in relation to his or her own life experiences.
It was not what was known about people that created these mysteries, but rather, what was not known about them. And the means of inferring what was not clear was what fascinated Lucky.
“Who,” she said out loud, “am I looking for?”
Lucky reviewed what was known about Lobsang.
Birth: Tibet. Age, estimated 52 years.
Family: Fled Lhasa. Raised as a refugee. Alienation? Disaffection? Outrage?
Physical health: Presumed excellent. Past injury to leg or hip?
Education: Non-traditional. Religious. Medical college in England.
Employment: Charity. Hobbies ???
Life experiences. Little known?
He’s a Buddhist monk who has renounced the world as an illusion. Where would he be? Would he be in Mumbai? Did that make any sense?
Lucky went to her computer and brought up her address book. She had a list of friends and suppliers from her days in Mumbai and from Lockwood Enterprises in New York. She shot off e-mails to all her contacts in Mumbai describing Lobsang and enclosing two snapshots of him, one as a student in London and the other the sketch they had. Coleman might not be very pleased, this being “strictly confidential,” but what the heck, she reckoned. It was better than sitting and dreaming about him and where he could be.
At the afternoon staff meeting, Coleman was insistent in hearing what progress had been made toward finding Lobsang. He glared at Lu
cky.
“It is less efficient,” Lucky said in defense, “for us to look for him than to create conditions in which he will look for us.”
Her observation provoked a round of sniggers from the staffers gathered around the table. Even Coleman was taken aback. “What the hell am I paying you for?” he asked. “You’re not an accountant anymore. Resources are not the problem. We have all the resources in the free world at our disposal.”
“It takes years to find the major leaders of drug or terrorist outfits, even when we know a great deal about them. And when we succeeded, in most cases, it was through an act of betrayal by one of their lieutenants. Take Saddam Hussein, for example. One of his former lieutenants led to his capture. Not spies, not spy satellites, not hi-res photos and X-rays and infra-reds. And we knew a lot about Saddam Hussein. We know next-to-nothing about Lobsang’s recent past.”
Coleman frowned. “He’s a man, goddammit, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time.”
“Actually,” Lucky said, “he might not even wear pants.”
Another round of laugher.
“What do you mean?”
“For all you know, he might dress in flowing white robes. Or a lungee. We really don’t know what he wears.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“No,” Lucky said, “That’s precisely the point. You’re looking for a man and you don’t know the first thing about him. What he wears. What he eats. What he might do for recreation.”