by Tom Knox
His mother. Jake could remember the chain of events, with new and superb clarity. He had woken in the night, age nine or ten, and seen a face, looming above him: his mother, crying, and whispering in the dark and saying goodbye, and saying Jake I love you I will always love you and kissing him. And then she was gone.
A white face, in the night, the white face of his mother, with the dark tang of wine on her breath – hovering and then gone. The next morning they realized she had left them – abandoned them all. Broken and drunk and unable to bear the grief of Rebecca’s death, she had fled.
Eyes locked on the warm blue skies, Jake seized upon this simple truth. That was why he had dreamed those dreams. Women with white faces and disembodied heads: with their heads detached from their necks, krasues, arps, palanggans, black-tongued kali, it was no witchcraft, it was just a hidden echo, a concealed trigger: these persistent images from the local culture had found a dark and troubling resonance in Jake’s deeply denied memories, his repressed memories, his mother’s white face in the dark in the middle of the night, almost like a dream, saying I love you Jake – and crying and whispering and then leaving, abandoning her living child. His mother was the kinaree, she was the krasue, the nightghost that sucked at him, and yet she wasn’t: there was no such thing.
It had just been a tragedy. It was not his fault. It was just a meaningless tragedy that happened to a piteously small boy – himself.
But now he could understand, and he could cope. The guilt was gone, the darkness was dispelled. He was just a man confronted by meaningless suffering, in a pitiless world.
Meaningless.
Jake stared at the meaningless mountains and the ridiculous stupa and the pointless Tibetan villager. The futility was quite extraordinary. That all of this, all that was visible everywhere: forests and sky and high cirrus clouds and villagers and Chemda on the terrace, and Zhongdian and the cement storks, and Bangkok and England and people everywhere and all the death and suffering, it was all bitterly and blissfully pointless.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. The Zen and withered garden of nothingness. There was no meaning to anything: and in that absence of meaning there was a logical beauty. Of sorts.
Now Jake felt a swaying sensation. And a pain in his head, under the scar, a stinging itch. And he was hungry.
His body needed nutrition, so he marched back to the terrace where they were still waiting for him. Ty and Sen and Chemda and Fishwick were sitting at the wide tables, now laid with Tibetan food.
Chemda’s expression was shocked and sad. Tyrone’s expression was wry and intrigued:
‘So how do you feel, trooper?’
Jake pulled up a chair.
‘I feel OK. Better.’
‘Better?’
‘Better than I have felt . . . in a long time.’
Tyrone applauded.
‘There, told ya.’
Sovirom Sen nodded with satisfaction. Even the melancholic Fishwick managed a wistful smile.
Only Chemda was unhappy. She reached out a hand and touched Jake’s hand, her sadness was obvious. He gazed at her fingers, with the bitten fingernails.
‘And what do you feel about me?’ she said.
‘Yeah, better,’ Jake said. ‘C’mon, of course, better about you and everything! Hey. Can we have some food, I am starving?’
Tyrone laughed again:
‘Guess you’re truly mended.’
Chemda took her hand away from Jake’s. He didn’t care, his stomach was protesting its emptiness. He filled a plate with apples and barley breads and a fat dollop of red goat stew and tomatoes in oil and mustard seeds. And he ate, lustily and hungrily, chasing his food with slugs of barley beer, and salted tea from big mugs.
The food was bizarre and it was delicious: he had never had a finer meal. He was free. Jake was a free man.
His stomach was filling in a gratifying way. Clanking a glass of barley beer with Tyrone he sank another swallow of beer, while Sen smiled his aloof and satisfied smile, and Fishwick looked discreetly at Chemda who was staring, silent, downcast, at her food.
Jake returned to his celery in sesame, the hard yak cheeses and momo barley dumplings, even as he ignored the shouting. Then he couldn’t ignore it: Cars were pulling up. Shouts and gunfire echoed across the mighty valley.
Shouting? Gunfire?
Jake gazed down from the terrace.
Men were streaming through the village, into the lab, running past the lab. Men with scars.
They were firing their guns in the air, shouting at everyone, blind fury showing on dark faces.
Lucidly frightened, and calmly alarmed, Jake stayed im mobile. More shouts from behind the lab told Jake that they were surrounded and trapped.
Sen was on his feet, yelling. But the men with the scars ignored him, crudely laughing, jeering even.
Jake stared.
In the middle of the gang at the foot of the steps leading to the terrace was Julia. And next to the Canadian woman was . . . Chemda. Except Chemda was also sitting next to him at the table.
The other Chemda had a gun; she was aiming it at Sen. Her face was calm, determined, and entirely merciless.
Chapter 45
‘I am Soriya. Chemda is my sister. And you –’ the gun was pointed at Sen, standing defiantly on the top step, ‘You, of course, are my grandfather. The man who did this to me.’
The young Khmer woman took off a wig and Jake saw the scar on her bald scalp.
‘When I was six months old.’
The scar was faded, almost white.
Soriya Tek turned to the Chinese men, the other men with scars, with their rifles hoisted or pointing. They were the same mutinous guards from the back gate, the men who had tried to bleed Jake out. She spoke to the men.
‘Here. Just as I promised you. Revenge. Here. Now.’ A step forward; a blunt gesture. ‘Kill them all, except for her,’ Soriya pointed at Chemda, ‘and him.’
Soriya was pointing at Jake.
‘He is one of us. See the scar. Spare him. Kill the rest.’
An uncertainty prevailed. Some of the men moved towards the terrace, others lingered; Soriya said, more loudly: ‘Tā shì wmen měi yīgè rén. Bèijiàn tāshā s, qíyú!’
The men moved, properly commanded. In moments the terrace was crowded with the guards, Jake could smell the sweat on them. Beer and yak butter and dirt. Sen was led down the steps, then Fishwick, and Tyrone.
Only Tyrone was struggling, shouting. Only Tyrone was fighting.
‘Jake, for fuck’s sake, tell them. Tell them, dude! Fucking tell them! I’ve got nothing to do with this –’
The mob of guards was dragging Tyrone to the nearest cliff, just a few metres away; the cliff plunged, gruesomely, right down to the heaven villages. Maybe half a mile or more.
‘Jake, please, fucking please, Jake. Tell them!’
Jake observed Tyrone’s struggling. He considered, clearly and logically, the fact that Tyrone had betrayed him: no matter that the surgery was a success, Tyrone had risked Jake’s life for his own purposes. Did he deserve to live? Maybe not. And there was another factor to be considered: if Tyrone was dead then Jake had no rival, he could tell his own story. Make all the money. Jake stepped down the terrace, Chemda followed him. He approached his friend. His ex friend. He gazed into Tyrone’s terrified eyes.
‘Mate,’ said Jake. ‘I’m sorry.’
He stepped away.
The men dragged Tyrone the last metre to the edge of the cliff. Chemda was gazing at Jake, appalled; Jake didn’t care.
Let Tyrone die.
Now the American was crying. The hard-assed Tyrone Gallagher was sobbing like a child, and pleading for his life.
‘Please, no, Jake, pleeeeeease.’
Soriya gestured.
Tyrone was thrown over the cliff. Jake peered over. His friend actually twirled in the air, the drop was so huge. The spectacle was fascinating. Jake watched his friend smash against an outcrop of rock, an interesting pink blur of bl
ood showed the body exploding with the impact. The corpse bounced and disappeared into the gorge.
Julia was crying.
Soriya turned to Fishwick.
‘Him next. Tā de xià yīgè.’
Fishwick was dragged to the side of the cliff by the sweating guards. The sun shone down on them all, harsh and uncaring. The neurosurgeon was not even struggling, his expression was resigned. His grey ponytail hung limply in the sun.
But Chemda intervened.
‘No, please no – don’t kill him!’
Soriya turned.
‘Why not?’
‘I am your sister, am I not? Your twin sister? Do this for me. Spare him.’
Soriya paused. A brief flash of emotion crossed the killer’s dark impassive face. Illegible emotion: sadness, grief, something profound and repressed. Jake watched, deeply intrigued. Julia was staring his way.
‘For my sister?’ Soriya gestured to the guards. ‘Ach. What does it matter. Let him go. I don’t care. But I will kill my grandfather. Bring me the axle.’
Fishwick was released; Sen was pushed to the edge of the precipice. The pine trees whispered in a mountain breeze; the gorges yawned, dark and hungry.
‘Kneel,’ said Soriya.
The grandfather knelt. Sen looked up, and said, very quietly:
‘How did you get past the main guards? The inner barrier?’
Soriya shrugged. ‘They thought I was Chemda. They were confused.’ She waved a hand at the sweating, scarred men, the severed men. ‘These other guards, your mistakes, they have decided to help me. I discussed this with them many months ago. I came here in secret. We agreed to all of this. They agreed. You invoke no loyalty, Sen. You mutilated so many. There is no one to help you. Everyone in the laboratory has scattered. They know the PLA is coming.’
Sen smiled.
‘But you think this upsets me, daughter? Please. I am not grieved. I am not ashamed, I am proud of you. I wanted to create the perfect communist child. And behold: I succeeded. Because here you are, guilt-free, devoid of mercy, and purely logical. My beloved granddaughter. Biologically atheist.’
‘You gave me away. How beloved is that?’
‘We thought you were a failure! You were taken in the anarchies, the dilapidations, when the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed in Anlong Veng. I never knew what happened to you, do you understand, my child? I didn’t dare hope that you had lived, the baby with the seizures, the fits, and yet, when I began to hear of these pitiless slayings, these cruel and clever murders, I knew. I aspired, Soriya, I hoped that you lived, that you thrived. I sensed you were coming, and I wanted to see you. So I could compare you with your superstitious sister, the control experiment. See if you had evolved. And I regard you now with true delight. My wonderful and beautiful experiment. My perfected, liberated and entirely Godless granddaughter.’
Soriya had taken a rusty iron bar from one of the guards. A car axle.
‘I am not a granddaughter, I am not even a woman. I am not a man either. I am nothing. You made me into a nothing. Barely human. You severed me from everything. A freak with no breasts. See.’
She tugged open her shirt. Jake winced at the pale scar tissue she briefly exposed. A double mastectomy: two more wounds.
‘By the time I was eighteen, I was desperate. Why was I so sick in the head? What was wrong with me? Why did I feel that something was wrong, something was missing? So I began to think: maybe I was the wrong sex. And I went to Bangkok. And I had surgery. Sex reassignment.’ Soriya sighed tersely, and rebuttoned her shirt with one hand. She went on: ‘The surgeons cut off my breasts, took out my womb – and gave me hormone injections. Testosterone. And they told me to walk like a boy. This was meant, or so I hoped, to make me better. Turning me into a kind of katoey. A she-he.’ She snarled at her grandfather, and clutched the iron bar tighter. ‘Yet it didn’t work. Of course. I was just angrier than ever. I had mutilated myself for no reason. I went back to America. Went back to being a girl. With no breasts. Mutilated. A man with no penis. Then I joined the army. At that, I was good, a surprisingly strong young woman. All those testosterone injections, all the steroids. So all this has been useful. It has helped me get here, where I can kill you.’
Sen’s smile was gone; for the first time Jake saw con fusion on the old man’s face.
He mouthed a word but Soriya cut him off.
‘Turn that way. Turn that way. Cheung Ek. Tuol Sleng. Highway Five. This is for everyone who died. For all the people killed by communism. For the country you beheaded. Turn that way.’
The first shudder of fear trembled at Sen’s mouth.
‘You really think that I should die-–’
The iron bar swung into the back of Sen’s head: the sound of the skull splitting was pulpy, organic, a plashing crack. The brains squirted into the dust, the broken head gaped open, pornographically. Soriya sneered at the sight, then she kicked the twitching body off the edge of the cliff.
‘Now, you, give me a gun.’
One of the guards handed a revolver to Soriya.
‘Throw me off the cliff when I’m finished. At least I can kill myself without guilt. The one thing they gave me.’
She turned and walked a few metres down the cliff and put the gun to her head, and like she was slaughtering a hog with a bolt, she blew her own brains out. Another shower of blood, another splatter of bone.
The weeping sound was Chemda – she had turned away from the scene, crying. Jake watched, absorbed. He watched as the scarred men did their duty: Soriya’s twitching body was hurled off the cliff. Vultures circled down the gorge, seeking the carrion.
Patches of blood and splinters of bone were glistening in the sun. A yak stared placidly at the men, who had already begun to disperse. The guards were drifting away, some were now running.
Within moments, Fishwick, Julia, Chemda and Jake were standing on the edge of Balagezong village. Quite alone. The wind murmured in the yunnanese forests, soft breezes fluting their grief.
Or was it grief? Where was the grief?
Jake touched the scar on his head. It was stinging. He could feel the pain in his mind at war with the clarity. Guilt was still there, in his mind; yet he could not connect with it; it was a cherished poem he had forgotten, a beauti ful song he could not quite recall. Just like his love for Chemda.
He felt suddenly blinded. He was blind to something. He had lost a sense. How could he have done that, to Tyrone? Why didn’t he feel remorse?
As he touched his own face, he realized he had wetness on his fingers. Astonishingly, he seemed to be crying. But he didn’t know why.
‘Chemda,’ he said, ‘what have they done to me?’
She reached for his hand. Jake could feel the moistness, like tears, on his face, but he didn’t know what it was for. He wasn’t crying. He was just leaking. He was just fucking leaking.
He was a machine, a dead battery, he was Soriya, he was pitiless. A soft machine leaking oil.
Jake hunched down. He wanted to make himself small, to hide from the world. This was bitter and disastrous, everything was futile.
Chemda stooped and kissed him and she whispered:
‘There is something we can do.’
Chapter 46
She repeated, ‘There is something we can do. But there are dangers. Colin told me, a few days ago, that is why I asked Soriya to spare him.’
Fishwick kneeled beside Jake, and spoke. He was hesitant, repressing a stammer, or deep emotions.
‘The operation we did on you was cryosurgical. Stand please . . . Let me explain.’
Jake allowed them to guide him to the terrace. He sat down and gazed out at the village. It was apparently deserted. No doubt the locals were hiding, frightened by the gunshots. The hideous scene enacted on the cliffside. And yet, now everyone had gone, the guards, the lab workers, Sen and Tyrone and Soriya – all gone – it was eerily peaceful. A deceptive serenity enveloped Balagezong. The mist drifted in and out of the heaven villages.
&nbs
p; How could he have let them do that to Tyrone?
Fishwick explained:
‘It took us many years. To . . . perfect the surgery. Eventually we realized that the solution was conceptual: the God module should be treated as a difficult and in accessible brain tumour. You can imagine Sen was pleased with the metaphor. The analogy. Religion and guilt as a malignant cancer, in an otherwise healthy organism.’
Fishwick shrugged, and continued:
‘But I haven’t got time to explain it all, the Chinese authorities will surely be here soon, with the Chinese army – and if my operation is to succeed I have to work immediately.’
Jake was bewildered. Julia and Chemda were sitting together in silence. Like sisters. He said:
‘Operation?’
Fishwick explained:
‘The God module isn’t just a little blob of tissue in one part of the human brain . . . Using ultrasound, PET scans, MRIs of Tibetan monks, and many other analyses, we finally established that the God module was an extremely complex system centred in the frontal cortex, but linked to the hip pocampus, the amygdala, the thalamic nuclei, and elsewhere, like a vicious, octopoidal tumour. The . . . the best way of treating these invasive and complex tumours is cryosurgery: the use of extreme cold produced by liquid nitrogen, or argon gas, to destroy abnormal tissue.’
‘You froze my fucking soul?’
‘If you like. The nitrogen is circulated through a hollow instrument called a cryoprobe. A ball of ice crystals forms around the probe, freezing the unwanted cells. So yes . . . We freeze the soul to death.’
The snow on the Holy Mountain glittered in the afternoon sun, crystalline and prismatic. Fishwick continued, his mild faced aged with remorse:
‘But there is a problem. Although we have, theoretically, perfected the surgery, that is to say: we have created stable and functioning minds, anatomically incapable of spiritual belief, or religious delusion . . . I have noticed that the outcomes are still . . . suboptimal. There is often something missing, which cannot be adequately defined. A flatness of the emotions, or a lack of psychic music. A kind of deafness. I have concluded that many humans are probably meant to believe. They have evolved to believe. Consequently, taking away this possibility, in some patients, is a grave error . . .’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps you too, Jake, were meant to believe. You have merely repressed this belief for many years, because of the traumas of your youth. Hm? As I understand? You are angry at God, but you still believe in Him, deep down. At least you did believe, until we did what we did. The surgery.’