The Devil Tree

by Jerzy Kosiński

  I thought about the black girl who had gone with me to Whalenburg. Once she found out who I was, she refused to have anything more to do with me. I had enjoyed the intensity of our lovemaking—the search for the source of sensation, the simple breakdown of the barriers the mind and body erect so easily—and I wanted to keep her with me. I even pleaded with her, promised to take her abroad, insinuated that I would make her rich. She wouldn’t listen. She had made up her mind. I meant trouble to her, she said, for no matter how much I wanted her, I would soon have had enough of the sex and then I would say to her, “Go home, blackbird, there’s no longer a place for you in my white cage.” Fear of being used and rejected by a white man was still stronger in her than the desire for any new experience I might give her—regardless of its cost.

  I wanted to call Karen but I felt drained. What’s more, I knew she had better things to do than attend to a sick man.

  I’ll never forget the day I found her with her face caked in a natural mud mask and her body wrapped in towels that had been soaked in her own urine. As most dermatologists and beauticians know, she told me, urine is the ideal moisturizer, the best remedy for dry, cracked skin, and it has been used by beauty-conscious men and women since Babylonian times. The best of the commercially produced moisturizers all contain some urea, but Karen assured me that the natural fluid is more effective. She should know. She said she’s been using it for years and that, in spite of all her sunbathing and sitting under studio lights, her skin is as smooth and lustrous as it was when she was a little girl.

  • • •

  Sometimes, when I was a child, I wouldn’t see my father for months, and I would nourish a fantasy of him visiting hundreds of Whalenburg workers one after another and having supper in their homes. I told myself that I was lucky to have a father who was important enough to bring employment, money, and happiness to so many people and to so many other children, even though it meant that he never had enough time for me. I never imagined that my father didn’t really care about me deep down; I simply knew that I was just one child, but that he had to feel responsible for the fate of every smoking chimney in Whalenburg.

  If he were alive today, my father would have no idea of who I am. I doubt if he could answer the simplest questionnaire about my height, weight, or childhood illnesses. He certainly would know nothing about my tastes, my friends, or the state of my mind. And what would he, a man who refused even to travel unless it was for business, have to say about the idle years I spent abroad?

  • • •

  In Nepal I lived among many Tibetan refugees. To a Tibetan, death is a transition either into an incarnate state—a bodily form possessed in the past or an entirely new one—or into a discarnate state—a bodiless, immaterial form of existence. How a person has lived his life determines whether or not he will be reincarnated. Only a lama, a master of the topography of discarnation and incarnation, can perform the rituals liberating the spirit from the cycle of death and rebirth; and only he has foreknowledge of what death is like.

  The rituals to be performed when death approaches are codified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If one follows these guidelines with great care, after death he will still be able to hear the voice of the lama and to act on his precepts.

  As I listened to my Tibetan friends, I had an uneasy sensation that once before, as if in a previous life, I had heard the voice of the lama. Before going abroad I was shown my living trust, an agreement between my father and the trustees that placed a large part of my father’s estate in an irrevocable trust for me. It instructed the trustees on how to administer the principal and interest from my father’s estate during his lifetime until I came of age, and it also prescribed how the trust was to be continued in the—then so unlikely—event of his death. Unlike my father’s last will, which he could change from time to time, the living trust was a final, absolute commitment of his wealth, and because of the substantial estate tax benefits and savings it involved, once it was created the law required its creator to surrender all supervisory powers to a group of trustees.

  Thus, during his short lifetime, which spanned great economic and social changes, Horace Sumner Whalen, a Protestant lama from Whalenburg, created the living trust, his own Book of the Dead, to aid me, his uninitiated son, in the course of my future life.

  • • •

  “In addition to the steel, glass, aluminum, oil, and tooling industries that he and his company owned, your father was an acute land and real estate investor, Mr. Whalen.

  “Shortly before his untimely death, your father realized the risks involved in owning real estate in slums, where so many blacks, Latins, Jews, and various Slavs live. Month after month many of them either refused or were unable to pay the rent, and their slums soon became an economic burden on your father’s company. Now, according to law, the city must take title to any property that falls four years behind on its taxes. That’s why, after a few years of ownership, acting on the excellent advice of Walter Howmet, your father relinquished some of those slum buildings; that is, he let the city take them over, at a substantial, but tax-deductible, loss to the company, which, however, in view of the company’s skyrocketing profits, turned out to be a good tax shelter. Then the city had to get rid of those unprofitable buildings. It tried to unload them at public auction but there were few buyers; most of the properties remained unsold. As a result, the city was forced to offer your father’s company a sizable fee to manage these slums and maintain them for their tenants—who are, incidentally, paying their rent with money received from the city’s welfare rolls. Now that is a perfect dialectical example of turning public funds into private profit!

  “Your father even found ways to avoid responsibility for downright abominable slum buildings the company owned in the Bowery. For instance, he would award the operating leases to other syndicates or conglomerates, which in turn would lease them to individual landlords, who, unfortunately, are often not too scrupulous. Be that as it may, your father did not personally supervise the buildings. And it was very unfair when at times the so-called liberal press referred to him as another ‘invisible slumlord.’ He was hardly that. And you, as your father’s heir, are no more responsible for the slums than your father was.”

  • • •

  Whalen put down the roof of his convertible and rolled down the windows. A sharp wind was blowing, and he felt small droplets of mist on his face and hands and neck. Like a huge sand yacht without its sail, the car rocked to the right and left in time with the swaying birches that arched high above the road. In front of him, the highway and the alley of trees seemed to disappear into the distance. Whalen stopped the car. He got out, wrapped his coat tighter around him, and walked toward the dense woods.

  High above him the wind continued to snap the treetops back and forth, but within the shelter of the woods the ground was dry and sandy; nearby, in the tall grass, a grasshopper chirped. The sound, a voice of the earth, warmed him, and for a moment he felt at peace.

  • • •

  “I remember you, Mr. Whalen, when you were still a tiny kid, riding with your father in that black company limo that would stop in here to fill up. Down here in steel country, you might say folks are as patriotic as your father was; they just don’t like foreign things. It’s good you’ve gotten yourself a nice American-made automobile, Mr. Whalen. Things are rough here for anybody coming in with one of those little Japanese or German imports; the gas station attendant might just slip a couple of sugar cubes into their gas tank, courtesy of Detroit, you might say. Soon after they swallow that sugar, those little foreigners get awfully sick; they cough, spit, puff. And nobody can repair them anymore! No, sir!

  “What I’m saying, Mr. Whalen, is that since Detroit don’t make convertibles anymore, you were smart to have one of their Fords decapitated, like, to your own specifications. And smarter yet to hide a twelve-cylinder supercharged Ferrari gas-guzzler under that fine-looking American hood. Yes, sir! Your father would have been mighty proud of his
boy!”

  • • •

  I went with Karen to the American Cancer Society charity ball. As we watched the gala parade of the latest whims in fashion, extravagances whipped up by the country’s best designers and shown by one stunning model after another, Karen introduced me to a good-looking middle-aged man. He was an old acquaintance of hers, she said; together they had smoked and snorted the best coke in town. The man told me he was in “special investments” and said that he had learned a lot about me from Karen. At first, as if letting me in on a well-kept secret, he spoke of the advantages of smoking—rather than sniffing—cocaine in its most potent form: a free base. Since Pizarro’s time, this has been a favorite pleasure of Latin American Indians. The free base is considerably more expensive than regular coke because a certain salt has been separated out of it which in regular coke represents at least one-fifth of the weight. Thanks to the proximity of the heart to the lungs, the free base, because it is smoked, is absorbed into the bloodstream quickly, and the exhilaration it causes lasts for several hours and is many times more intense than the one caused by snorting regular coke.

  Just as he started to tell me how to increase the potency of the free base by smoking it in special ways, I interrupted him. I said there was hardly anything about cocaine that I did not know from past experience. I told him my doctors in Rangoon had scrupulously obtained only the best cocaine—as long as I was paying for it—for my treatment, because it is still the most effective opium disintoxicant known to science. I also said I had read most of the available literature on opium and coke, beginning with Freud, who suffered for years from depression, apathy, and anxiety and referred to cocaine as his ideal and beloved drug. Freud’s enemies claimed that by overpraising the efficacy of the drug in this way in his writings, he had made it, after alcohol and opium, the third scourge of mankind.

  Finally, I said that I had no longer any interest in taking drugs, and at that the man changed the subject. He began to talk about his special investments: drug dealing on a grand scale in the underdeveloped nations, to which cultivating poppies and refining opium into morphine and heroin are what producing oil is to Arab nations. Next to oil, he said, illicit drugs are the largest international moneymaker; their American sales alone generate three times as much money as the entire steel industry. Given its magnitude, the illicit drug business is an amazingly centralized, reliable, and well-run enterprise; it controls the production, supply, quality, and price of narcotics as efficiently as legitimate business controls any other international commodity. A dozen large banks act as clearing houses and laundering channels for the dope business. The man said that his contacts covered the major opium-producing countries of the “Golden Square”—Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Red China, which was the major grower and transporter. With the ease and enthusiasm of a businessman discussing iron ore or textiles or electronics, this man told me that a fifteen-hundred-pound load of pure uncut heroin, half the weight of an American sedan, costs him about eight million dollars through his contacts. A few weeks after purchase, courtesy of bribed diplomats, local officials, and air force and navy base commanders, the stuff reaches his distribution agents in New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, where its value is over three hundred million. The man pointed out that ours are inflationary times; it takes an investment of many millions of dollars to produce one Hollywood movie—and nobody can even guarantee its success. Eight million dollars is also a lot of money to invest in a once-a-year operation, but at least its profits are guaranteed—and what profits! They should not be brushed aside, even by someone of my wealth, the man said with a note of invitation in his voice. As he spoke, I could tell that he was proud of his lucrative business. In the grain of the classical American entrepreneur, he was the true descendant of those eighteenth-century merchants of New England who encouraged poppy planting in China in order to profit from the trade in “black rice,” as opium was then called. Indeed, Americans were so aggressive in this venture that they were accused by both the British and the French of being unwise and indiscriminate in their opium dealings, thereby causing widespread addiction in China.

  Today, the man said, he felt sorry for the “ordinarily decent” American businessmen who have to work their tails off to make the small profit that is left to them after excessive taxation. He said he makes more money in terms of actual dollars, in his pursuit of easy happiness—putting big deals together while attending parties, courting beautiful women, and traveling all over the world—than my father did in a lifetime of joyless Protestant endeavor. “You may have noticed in today’s paper that the police are very proud of themselves for discovering an abandoned car with two hundred and fifty pounds of heroin in the trunk. They claimed the street value of the stuff was close to forty million dollars. Of course, the police usually exaggerate. Let’s be conservative and say it was worth only fifteen million. Think of it! A suitcase in the trunk of a Ford worth fifteen million dollars! To make that kind of money, Mr. Whalen, your father needed to own mines and factories, railroads and highways, and entire company towns; he had to employ hundreds of thousands of workers; he had to talk to the unions, brown-nose politicians, be nice to the people in power. All I need, you might say, is the short-term friendship and cooperation of a few foreign diplomats, a U.S. flight sergeant, some Coast Guard customs men, and one or two smart, well-placed narcotics detectives.

  “But I can see that you think all this is a dirty and vicious business, Mr. Whalen,” he said. “Let me remind you that you are also engaged in corrupt enterprise, however indirectly. Do you know that the fish caught near the out-wash of some of the Whalen factories are unfit to eat because the rivers and lakes have been contaminated by nickel? That the same nickel has also damaged the livers of the workers in the Whalen company’s smelters, mines, and plating factories? That as a result of the poisoning, these men and women often die young of high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, and arthritis? It’s true. So how about throwing all the humanity crap to the diseased fish too and talking business for a minute?

  “When the government admits that last year Americans spent more on narcotics than they did on imported oil, I don’t feel responsible for the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of hashish suckers, pipe masticators, and disco freaks who use spoons, tinfoil, and needles to hit themselves with the dope. You were once an addict yourself, Mr. Whalen; you know I don’t make them do it. The man in the black overcoat who gives American kiddies free samples so they’ll become hooked on hash is a shitty Madison Avenue myth. He has never existed and never will. Why should he give away free samples when he can sell every bag he gets?”

  • • •

  As Whalen waited on the street corner for the light to change, a plump man with a neatly folded newspaper under his arm absentmindedly tapped the pavement with his black umbrella. Next to him, a woman wearing a cloth coat and ankle socks set down her shopping bags and rummaged through her handbag until she found a scarf and an accordion-pleated plastic rainhat.

  The traffic light turned green. All three of them crossed the street, went single file into the subway, bought their tokens, and pushed through the turnstiles. Whalen stayed close to the woman. Ambling toward the front of the platform, she put a coin into a gum machine, but no gum came out. She inserted another coin. Still no gum. The woman then noticed the mirror at the top of the machine and stood on tiptoe in order to see her whole face in it. She smiled at herself, pushed some stray wisps of hair into place, then walked to a bench against the wall, sat down, arranged her bags, and rubbed her eyes. The subway rumbled as it approached. People on the platform fidgeted, shifting their weight. The train caused a draft of air and came to a stop. Whalen entered the closest car and hurried to a seat. The plump man with the newspaper was behind him getting in. As the train jolted forward, Whalen settled back and looked around. The other passengers seemed preoccupied with small details; they buttoned or unbuttoned their coats, smoothed their hair, looked at their watches, gathered their packages together,
pressed umbrellas to their sides. The manner, dress, and look of every one of them betrayed an overwhelming sense of busyness, of immediate purpose. Except for the fact that he was on this subway with them, Whalen realized with a pang, he had nothing in common with these people. His stomach felt hollow and cold, his heart was in a vise. Holding his breath and bracing himself against the train’s rocking, he impatiently counted the stops and promised himself never to ride the subway again.

  • • •

  Whalen hurried through the lobby of his hotel, his clothes dripping water onto the carpet and the floor of the elevator. Once in his suite, he changed into dry clothes, but he was still shivering with cold. He gulped down a glass of cognac, and then, having nothing better to do, he decided to go downstairs. Maybe he could sense what Karen had once called “the throbbing of the hotel lobby.”

  It was late. The only people in the lobby were a man at the cashier’s window, an elderly woman talking on the house phone, and a plump man reading a newspaper. Whalen was about to go to the bar when he recalled that he’d seen the same plump man on the street corner and again on the subway. As Whalen glanced at him again, the man raised the newspaper in front of his face.