by Rio Youers
Beyond the traumatic first hours of Lang’s life and the subsequent neurological concerns, I didn’t discover much about his childhood. I thought I might read about how he’d manipulated his teachers with mind control, or killed everybody at the high school prom. There was nothing like that. I learned that he was homeschooled, partly because his mother refused to admit him to a remedial facility, mostly because his father’s job took them all over the world. They lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, and Switzerland. It was here that a neurologist declared Lang’s autism a grave misdiagnosis, adding that he was a boy of “intimidating mental capacity.” This was as close as I got to finding any suggestion of telepathic ability.
The family returned to their home state of Tennessee in 1967. Lang, now fourteen years old, attended a conventional school for the first time: Conasauga High, where he excelled. I don’t know if he had friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, if he was on the track team or in the drama club. The only mention of his high school years was that he scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs. He went on to Laurel State University in Georgia, a small but prestigious school, where he majored in psychology and graduated summa cum laude in 1975.
Lang showed his political aspirations at Laurel State by running for student-government president. There were two other candidates. One of these, along with her running mate, stepped down only days into the campaign. The remaining candidate was a wildly popular senior named Mitt Grover, whose father was a Laurel State alumnus who’d pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the school coffers over the years. Simply put, Lang could run the tightest campaign and address the most important issues, but there was no way he was getting elected.
A local news station televised the election debate. I found stills but no video. The story came courtesy of the Macon Telegraph archives.
Everything was going well for Grover and his running mate. They had just made their opening statements to rapturous applause, and Grover in particular glowed with confidence. The Telegraph noted how the handsome young senior appeared “entirely in his element,” and that his opponent, Lang, “shifted uncomfortably during the applause.” There’s a still of Grover standing with one fist aloft, as if he’d already won, with Lang off to the side looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. They each fielded two questions put forward by students (Grover, again, to roof-shaking acclamation) and it was while answering a third question that Grover started to slur his words. There were ripples of unease from the audience, which turned to concern when blood dripped from Grover’s nose onto his pristine white shirt. He didn’t appear to notice. In fact, he must have thought the shouts of alarm were yet more plaudits, because he raised his fist again, slurred, “Go Wildcats,” and dropped dead on the stage.
The autopsy concluded that Grover had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm. As the candles were lit and the flowers laid, the obligatory questions were raised as to how such a vibrant young man could have had his light extinguished so suddenly.
I think I know.
There’s a chilling still of Grover lying facedown on the stage, his running mate kneeling beside him, already in tears, with Lang hovering in the background. The focus of the still is obviously Grover and his stricken comrade, so it’s easy to overlook the intense expression on Lang’s face. He is staring at Grover with his shoulders hunched and his Emperor Ming eyebrows forming a familiar bird shape—a raptor shape—across his brow. I remembered that bird shape clearly. I also remembered how he’d felt inside my brain, with his long spider legs ticking and gathering. I knew that with just one push—one squeeze—he could have ballooned every artery and turned my brain into pasta sauce.
Coincidence? Cold-blooded murder? It’s impossible to know for sure. What I do know is that Grover’s running mate was too emotional to continue the campaign, and the presidency was awarded to Lang.
There was another quiet period while Lang went to medical school, then completed his psychiatry residency at Yale. I bled the search engines for more brain-squeezing stories but found only dull biographical notes. He worked for a year at a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, and returned to Tennessee in ’86 to be close to his ailing father. After the old man died, Lang used a portion of his inheritance to establish his own clinic in Nashville. I found a picture of him standing outside the front doors, his arms wide and welcoming, that thin smile—anything but welcoming—touching his lips.
He met Gene Lyon in June of 1990.
I found no reference in books or online, due to the secrecy of their affair, but have subsequently learned how important—how stabilizing—Lyon was to Lang. They met at a fundraiser for then-gubernatorial candidate Jimmy Packer. It was attended by Tennessee’s Republican elite and a handful of carefully selected businesspeople. Gene Lyon was the campaign’s official photographer. At twenty-six, he was eleven years Lang’s junior, but this didn’t stop the men forming an immediate bond.
Lang said in a 2006 interview with Harper’s: “Gene was both brazen and ambitious—a magnetic, if alarming, combination. He worked Packer’s fundraiser with absolute professionalism, although I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Later, he said to me that he’d spent the day photographing falseness and pomp. When I asked what he’d rather be doing, he smiled and said, ‘Getting my hands dirty.’ I knew then we’d be friends forever.”
Lyon would get more than his hands dirty. He went from photographing Packer’s failed gubernatorial run to the war-torn streets of Kuwait, where his lens captured the charred corpses of Iraqi soldiers and bombed, blackened buildings and dead civilians—children among them—piled like laundry. His most notable photograph is of a US Marine holding a ravaged four-year-old girl’s hand and it’s the marine, not the girl, who’s in tears. The Gulf War was as far from falseness and pomp as it was possible to get. “It was a gallery of haunted images,” Lyon said of his work there. “Of agonies and truths. I was emotionally torn, professionally replete.”
He photographed burning villages in Bosnia and the victims of genocide wrapped in a thousand sheets. Another famous shot is of a bereft dog standing outside its shattered Srebrenica home. In Grozny, he immortalized a Chechen rebel who faced a squadron of Russian tanks armed only with a pistol. His exhibition at MoMA, titled War, Children, documented the Congo’s child soldiers in emphatic colors. Efrain Rivas at the New York Times called it a “visceral education.”
On May 15, 2004, a US warplane fired two missiles into a residential neighborhood in Fallujah, Iraq, killing twenty-six people. Lyon—stationed in Baghdad—arrived with his camera later that same day. Given the recent, brutal killings of American contractors in the area, he was urged by US officials to remain glued to his military escort. He heeded the warning for the first two days and on day three slipped away to photograph the broken streets of the Jolan district. The last shot he ever took is of a half-naked child standing outside the bombed marketplace where his father used to work.
In the first video, Lyon is on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back. Four Islamist militants veiled by black kaffiyehs stand behind him. One holds a sword above Lyon’s head. Lyon disjointedly introduces himself as Eugene Mark Lyon, an American photographer. He gives his date and city of birth. The militant with the sword demands the cessation of US airstrikes on civilian targets, and vows to paint the streets with American blood should a single missile fly.
The US government’s dictum, We don’t negotiate with terrorists, was underscored when, on May 21, American F16s targeted suspected militant positions in Ramadi and Fallujah. Thirteen women and nine children were among the dead.
I didn’t watch the second video, and it needs no description here. After Lyon was decapitated, his head was placed in the V of his crossed ankles and photographed using his own camera. His body was discovered tied to a burned-out truck on the outskirts of Fallujah.
Dominic Lang made no official statement. That was left to Lyon’s grieving family. The New York Times ran a four-page memorial and Time pro
duced a Gene Lyon special issue. Any number of photojournalists and correspondents paid tribute, but it was two years before Lang mentioned his good friend’s death and the effect it had on him.
This from the now defunct political magazine 365 Steps (June 2006):
Everybody feels deep grief at some point in their lives. Mine was exacerbated by a sense of disappointment and betrayal. I felt betrayed by America. By the system. I kept imagining the luminaries on Capitol Hill—some of whom were friends, all of whom are now peers—making decisions from their positions of luxury while, seven thousand miles away, Gene was tormented, abused, and beheaded. I remember feeling they could have done more to save him, and I was furious. I wanted to turn myself into a flame and run through everybody responsible. But time eases grief and dampens those irrational responses, and with a cooler head I realized that I could use my gift more productively. That was when I closed the clinic and established Nova Oculus.
The CIA sanctioned Project MK-Ultra in the 1950s, a covert program that used—among other things—torture, hypnosis, and hallucinogens to analyze behavioral modification and mind control in human subjects. When Lang gained renown for his work with Nova Oculus, human-rights activists drew comparisons to MK-Ultra. Lang assured his critics he used no drugs, hypnosis, or coercive persuasion, only known intelligence coupled with the minutia of behavioral science. His was a peaceable and effective form of interrogation. Given the outcry in the wake of human-rights violations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Lang’s work was not only embraced but celebrated. The CIA paid him vast sums of money to interrogate terrorism suspects both at home and at Guantánamo Bay, and the information he procured led to the capture or killing of several senior al-Qaeda operatives, the location of multiple strongholds, and the foiling of terrorist attacks in London, Toronto, and Boston.
Lang wasn’t lying; he didn’t use drugs to manipulate the prisoners’ minds. He didn’t use hypnosis or mind control. I know this from my own harrowing experience with him. He used telepathy, which he never denied, because it was never brought up. He may have given the impression of using “advanced intellective analysis,” but really he was spidering through the folds of his subjects’ brains, gathering intelligence, and being paid a king’s ransom for doing so.
Suddenly, Lang had wealth, power, and influence.
This could only lead to one thing.
In a 2005 interview on Larry King Live, the eponymous host asked Lang: “You were the student-government president at your alma mater. Do you still have political ambitions, or did you get that out of your system at a young age?”
“I’m invested in the well-being of our country,” Lang replied. “I want to make sure the right decisions are being made and that we’re moving forward as a nation. As of this moment, I believe Tennessee is well represented in Congress. Should that change, I would certainly consider my options.”
He didn’t have to wait long. Two months later, Eldon Pie, Tennessee’s long-serving Republican senator, resigned due to health complications. He’d suffered a debilitating stroke while playing golf (I don’t know who he was playing with, but had to wonder if Lang was swinging the irons that day). With fourteen months until the midterms, Governor John Pryce appointed Lang to the vacant seat.
So there he was, a member of the 109th Congress. In his first PR move, Lang promised—in the interest of homeland security—to keep Nova Oculus operational, but that he would remove himself from the payroll, thereby nullifying any concern that a sitting senator might profit from a government contract. He said he had every intention of running for reelection in 2006, although rumors in regard to 2008 were already circulating. I found a photograph of Lang and Bush embracing at a Rangers game. It had been captioned, with the president confiding: Don’t worry, I’ll keep the seat warm for you.
Within four years, Lang could have gone from being a noted psychiatrist to the leader of the free world. Everything was on track. And then, less than two months before the midterms, something went very wrong.
To begin with, he withdrew from the Senate race without explanation, having already spent millions on his campaign. While Tennessee Republicans scrambled to find a replacement candidate, Lang dropped another bomb by resigning his seat in Congress, effective immediately. A member of his staff cited health reasons. There were rumors of brain cancer, heart failure, retrograde amnesia. I found a picture of him stepping from the back of a limousine appearing withered and pale, reminding me how he looked—frail, sucking on oxygen—after spidering through my mind. In December ’06, he pulled the plug on Nova Oculus. At the subsequent press conference (appearing hardier but still far from healthy), he shed no light on the nature of his illness, but thanked everybody for their support, expressed how proud he was to have served his state and his country, and promised the rebirth of Nova Oculus—as well as a return to the political arena—as soon as he’d made a full recovery.
Then he faded from the public eye and from everybody’s minds. The last article I found was from September ’08 when he’d attended a Gene Lyon exhibition in Los Angeles.
* * *
The spider had done a commendable job of protecting his public image. I uncovered no dirt, no evil, other than the leaked e-mail about biting off his twin’s head, which he denied, and my own suspicion that he’d brain-fucked Mitt Grover. There was more to him, though. He’d been inside me, remember, and I’d felt that evil pulsing off his plump little body. Just because Google hadn’t been able to find it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
I found no mention of Sally, either. Not that I was expecting to. Lang knew her by a different name, which I couldn’t remember—Miranda something or other. I tried a few shot-in-the-dark searches and came up empty. Armed with my legal pad and pen, I used the information I had to make connections. They were tenuous, and there was still so much missing, but it was a start.
* * *
Nine years later, the spider had said. I can feel the impact—the emptiness of what she took from me. A great famishment of the mind.
Nine years ago: 2006, when he’d suddenly dropped out of the Tennessee senate race, resigned from office, and closed down his multimillion-dollar operation. There had been suggestions of cancer and amnesia, but it was Sally. She hadn’t simply taken his memories, she’d clawed them away (his words), leaving him with just enough to feel loss. She’d taken his power, too. I’m like a car running on a single cylinder, he’d said. Or a battery at five percent power. Thirty minutes in my brain and he’d been left withered. How could he manage the demands of the Oval Office when he couldn’t even breathe without aid?
But what was his connection to Sally? Had he recruited her for Nova Oculus—to keep the money rolling in while he made a run at the White House? Was she a threat to his power, his wealth? Whatever the circumstances, their paths had crossed and Lang had come out licking his wounds. He thought he was powerful, but he’d met his match.
No wonder he wanted to find her—to take back what was his. And as soon as he did, he would reestablish Nova Oculus. In light of the US Senate’s recent report on CIA torture, it isn’t a stretch to think there’d be considerable money involved in a nonviolent but efficient interrogation program. Dominic Lang would be back on his feet. The toast of the town. He would revive his political career, and then …
Don’t worry, I’ll keep the seat warm for you.
What happens when the most dangerous man on the planet becomes the most powerful? Or the most powerful becomes the most dangerous?
* * *
That copy of Orwell’s 1984—the one I’d rescued from Dad’s library—sat around for a while. I didn’t have time to read it, but I picked it up now and then and flipped through a few pages. It’s one of those novels where you can open it anywhere and read something provocative or chilling or both, but one sentence stood out above all others:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
It unsettled me. It got unde
r my skin and kept me awake at night. It evoked images of bug-eyed, fetus Lang sharing a womb with a tiny corpse, and Mitt Grover lying facedown with his handsome senior’s brain all watermelon-smashed. I felt betrayed by America, he’d said in the 365 Steps interview. I wanted to turn myself into a flame and run through everybody responsible. And I imagined him—President Lang—giving his State of the Union Address, and there we are, his fellow Americans, looking not at the eagle on his seal but at the raptor on his brow. How long before he tore our minds to pieces and put them together again in shapes of his own choosing? How long before he turned himself into a flame?
It was terrifying, entirely possible. All it takes is one tyrant with the power to surrender wills and manipulate. It’s happening right now to 1.6 billion people, in countries like Somalia and North Korea and Sudan and Myanmar.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces …
I’d felt that power (actually, I’d felt only 5 percent of that power), so it was easy to envision the aftermath: a cracked, smoldering nation, where the people had risen and their brains had been smashed, and where the brightest thing for miles in any direction was a single red feather laid upon the land.
This is how you’ll remember me.
Eleven
I decided Sun Tzu was full of shit.
I knew the enemy and knew myself, and feared the result of a hundred battles more than ever. Not that there would be one hundred battles—just one swift, effortless execution. I was out of my league.
On my penultimate night at Dad’s house, I sat with him at the kitchen table drinking heady, homemade wine and making ninja smoke bombs. Every twenty minutes or so one of us would stagger into the living room to flip the vinyl. We listened to Woodstock-era rock, the perfect soundtrack to my angst.
“Is all my hair going to fall out?” I asked, handling a crystallized concoction of sugar and potassium nitrate. “This shit can’t be good for you.”