“Naturally, since Jack has already been initiated he hardly needs to be told that the people he is killing are inferior. The way he has been taught to see it, not only are they socialist, but they are brown-skinned slope-headed communists who have Stone Age technology and eat on the floor. Of course it’s okay to kill them. You have to kill them to save them, obviously.”
I am upset. The implication of blatant genocide is a little hard for a half-caste like me to take. I try to control my thoughts.
“Right. Then something happens to change his head around? Fall in love with a local girl, for example?”
He looks at me with the curiosity of a man who expects little of life but can still enjoy the thrill of busting a fool’s naiveté. “Well, that might do it, temporarily. But it’s as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into it. Very often we fall out of love as a defense against threats to our core identity. I doubt such a boy as I’ve described could be in love with a communist, for example, for very long. No, I’m thinking of a more radical experience.”
“Death? The death or mutilation of a close friend?”
“Certainly, the presence of death is the essential factor in any initiation of depth. But what I’m talking about is something that blows the whole shooting match out of the water. Something so radical it really can break down all that tribal programming in one fourteen-hour period.”
I can guess where he’s going so I shrug and stare in expectation.
“Lysergic acid diethylamide.” He chuckles. “Oh, they were so right to be scared of it, with that uncanny instinct of theirs. Of course, it never came close to screwing up as many lives as alcohol, but it was infinitely more threatening to WASPs.” He shakes his head. “I’m not a religious man-as you correctly pointed out, acid helped me kill God-but there was something quite uncanny about the way it appeared at exactly that time.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean just when it was so desperately needed.” He catches my eye. “You know what I’m talking about of course?”
“I have an idea, but please tell me.”
“Omega Unit 197 of the MKUltra project, to be precise. LSD was my specialization. They were pretty much forced to recruit me, because no one had done as much research on it as had I. Mostly on myself. Acid was universally available in Vietnam, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the men took it. For many it was simply a psychedelic trip experienced purely at the level of sensory distortion. For others, though, who happened to take it at exactly the wrong, or, according to my perspective, the right moment-particularly those who volunteered for Ultra, or were volunteered by Ultra, so to speak-you ended up with an absolutely fascinating case of psychic nudity. A human soul stripped to its very variable essentials. A cloud of consciousness that suddenly sees. All too frequently, American servicemen who received such sudden wisdom could no longer function.”
“As soldiers?”
“As people. It was a terrible scandal. The military and the silent majority can only tolerate demons they are familiar with. The tribal programming allowed for all the usual battlefield psychoses and could even tolerate the extremely high incidence of heroin addiction among the men, not to mention alcoholism and suicide. But when the hippie movement threatened to spread to ’Nam, the idea of sending boys out there who would have their heads totally turned around by LSD supplied to them not by Charlie but by subversives straight out of Haight-Ashbury-what would be next, love-ins with the Vietcong?”
He pauses and rubs his chin. “But there was a parallel narrative. The CIA maintained a low profile because they were the ones who inadvertently caused the acid craze to spread by experimenting with it on human guinea pigs, most of them military personnel and not always volunteers. The public got the truth in tiny drops that precluded scandal, and all was going well until the news of the murder by the CIA of Dr. Frank Olson, more than twenty years after the event, hit the fans. Olson was a bacteriologist and CIA officer involved in the Company’s LSD experiments. Hell broke loose.”
He smiles. “You see, I was famous professionally, because of dozens of papers I had written on the subject of LSD. Famous, too, in the subculture, for singing its praises. They needed me even more than they hated me.” He frowns, takes out another Camel, and lights up. “I think it was my long hair they most resented. Their in-house shrinks were all gray men in suits with crew cuts. I was psychedelic, big time.”
“Why did they need you so much?”
“Collateral damage.” He taps his head. “Right here. And we’re talking thousands of souls. Uncle Sam doesn’t screw up by halves.” He sighs. “It really is a miracle drug. D’you see, it acts like an electron microscope-and that’s the problem. The teeniest, weeniest neurosis is magnified ten thousand times-and that’s merely with recreational use in favorable circumstances among friends. Imagine how it might affect one-” He stops to stare at me, as if unsure of the wisdom of continuing.
“What?”
“If some bastard is butchering a child in front of you, for example, as part of the experiment? Or ordering you to do so?”
I stare at him. Blood has drained from my face. I feel gray.
He remains quiet, giving me space. When he thinks I’ve recovered, he continues. “All their own shrinks wanted out pronto. The thing had gone horribly-and I mean horribly-wrong. The reputations of upward of a hundred psychiatrists was on the line. Not to mention the Company itself. I was an ideal scapegoat, a grinning clown with a doctorate in hallucinogens. Confident, too. Stupid, I suppose. But not so stupid that I didn’t realize how much they needed me. This was my moment. As it turned out, my nationality worked in my favor. They could blame everything on an alien-as usual.”
He looks at me as he coolly takes a toke. “I told them I needed a very big space where no one could find us. They said, ‘Not U.S. territory.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ They said, ‘How about Cambodia, we’ll buy a chunk through a shell company. We’ll do a secret protocol with the government so they leave you alone.’ Usual thing. I said, ‘Okay, but I need money.’ They said, ‘Money is no problem.’ I said, ‘I mean funding for the next twenty years. You don’t fix heads the way you fix broken legs.’ They said, ‘Funding for the next twenty, okay.’ They weren’t so sharp when it came to bargaining. They’d let me see how desperate they were, so I said, ‘No, funding for the next forty.’ They said, ‘Look, just make the problem go away. Whatever you need, you’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Seclusion. Absolute seclusion. Most of these guys and gals are never going back to the world. They need a special space to live and die in.’ That made them very happy. They even smiled. ‘How about dense jungle, twenty acres, only one way in and out, land mines all around?’ They were particularly generous with land mines. I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘We’ll send in the engineers to do the earthworks for you. Army huts good enough?’ I said, ‘Water? Electricity?’ They said, ‘No problem. As many army generators as you need. Wells as deep as you need. Pumps and pipes.’ I said, ‘Fuel?’ They said, ‘We’ll bury linked ten-thousand-gallon tanks for diesel, you’ll be self-sufficient for decades.’ I said, ‘Food? Cooking?’ They said, ‘Your problem. No normal person is allowed in. It’s you and the crazies. Grow what you need.’ ”
Bride draws another long toke on the Camel. “Of course, I saw what they were up to. They thought I’d never last more than a few years, but that was enough to pass the buck. They’d find a way of saying it was all the fault of this crazy Brit shrink: ‘Only have to look at him to see how mad he is. Don’t know how he got away with it for so long, trying to build some kind of LSD utopia in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.’ ” He smiles. “Actually, they were quite right. The man I was then would never have lasted. I had to become someone else, didn’t I? I had to go further with the LSD initiation. Further than anyone ever went. Much further than Leary would have dreamed possible.” He gives a wan smile. “Poor Timothy-I knew him well-so much talent, but he fell prey to the vice of evangelism.” He closes his eyes for a moment and allows a sardonic smile to bloom. “I’m talking about the early negotiations. Once we were settled they found reasons to take a deeper interest in us. But we’ll save that story for later if you don’t mind.”