Now he gazes over the river: mostly wet-look black with some reflection of city lights. “Most of them died, of course. Beautiful boys and some girls too-the women who had volunteered at Langley. Heads all fucked up. Know that poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg? ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’? It was worse than that by a thousandfold. Make that a million.” He is quiet for a long moment. “Suicide usually. I knew it would happen. What you will see tomorrow are the survivors. The best of the bunch. The toughest, anyway. The remnants.”
I am put in mind of a weekend seminar where the first evening is spent on introduction of the topic, prior to more serious learning the next day. After a few more minutes it becomes clear the Doctor has delivered his welcoming talk and now descends to entertaining anecdotes about life in Southeast Asia over the past forty years, how much has changed and how much has not. It seems he survived Pol Pot’s brutal regime, but he does not explain how. He is a gifted raconteur, though, and keeps me fascinated until it is time to go to bed.
20
I’m still at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Doc Bride called just now to say he has checked out already and is downstairs with a car and driver. He is impatient because the journey into the bush is long and slow at the other end and he wants to arrive at our destination by early afternoon. I’m throwing my toothbrush and shaving gear into my overnight bag, checking my money belt for passport and cash, dashing down to reception, paying in baht at a ruinous exchange rate, humping my bag out to the white Toyota four-by-four with a Khmer driver that is waiting at the curb. The Doctor and I sit in the middle seats, but at opposite windows. He issues an instruction to the driver in Khmer without saying hello to me.
–
Phnom Penh is a small town and it takes only a few minutes to reach the suburbs, which quickly degenerate into shantytowns with dirt roads between shacks with tin roofs. Quite often there are homemade elevated walkways to enable people to keep out of the mud during the rainy season. Kids have fun in tin cities like this; I catch sight of big, round, mischievous faces, small gangs with monkeylike mastery of the maze in which they live. On the other side of the glass it is already hot, of course, but not yet unbearable. I know these slums will be asleep before noon and stay that way until sunset. I have a feeling that where we are going may not have great satellite cover, so I make my early-morning call to Chanya.
“Hello, darling,” I say.
She grunts sleepily. “Where are you?”
“Phnom Penh, we’re in a van on our way to the jungle.”
“We?”
“I’m with Dr. Christmas Bride.”
I thought the name would amuse her, as it did the first time, but she merely grunts again.
“You okay?” I say.
“Yes. Except that I’m suffering from event starvation, Action Man.”
“See you in a day or so. There might not be any satellite cover where we’re going.”
“Take care,” she says.
I turn to look out of the window: scrappy bits of land, some huts, a brand-new part of a highway that says foreign investment all over it, some brush and paddy fields, a boy following a buffalo with a switch. I try to work out where this Englishman is coming from. In repose, when he is not making full use of his mobile features, there is much of the gargoyle in the way he stares malevolently into space.
At about noon the driver turns off the road, which is now bare concrete, onto the shoulder, which is an outreach of jungle remains. There are no tall growths and the scrubby bush looks unhealthy and primitive, as if something has poisoned such advanced life as trees and flowers, leaving only primeval vegetation that hugs the ground and crawls like something cowed and persecuted. I know that we have been traveling steadily east since we left the suburbs of Phnom Penh and that it was in the east that Nixon dumped his thousands of tons of bombs in a secret operation that was supposed to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but succeeded only in destroying Cambodia. I suppose we cannot be in that area yet; even so, the suspicion adds a kind of poison to the moment. When the driver opens the back I see a wicker basket piled up with sandwiches and two bottles of wine. The driver finds a collapsible table and even a tablecloth, wineglasses. The Doc and I sit opposite each other on folding chairs.
The sandwiches are well made, with enough of the juice from the tomatoes softening the white of the bread without compromising the craquant of the crust; the cheese, a buffalo mozzarella, makes, with the olive oil-and the hint of basil- a delicious soft multitone motif in the mouth, and the authority of the ham completes the symphony. The wine adds the frisson of narcotic essential for a complete culinary experience. This is all thanks to French influence in Cambodia. We eat in silence.
–
A couple of hours later the road turns into a mud track, then stops at a wall of jungle. Now we are staring at those huge exotic Asian hardwoods of the same kind that embrace giant stone Buddhas at Angkor. The only gap in the overwhelming vegetation is filled by a truck with a wheelbase at least five feet off the ground, with giant tires. Without a word Doc Bride gets out of the van and gestures for me to follow him to the truck, leaving the Khmer driver to turn around and go home.
We approach the truck from behind and it is from the passenger side that I first catch a glimpse of the man in the driver’s seat, a silhouette that reveals a mop of negroid hair so huge it is like an exotic bush. I would have expected it to belong to a lithe young fellow from the ’burbs, circa 1968, except that it is gray. When he turns around to acknowledge me, I see he is in his early seventies. Bride climbs in before me and the three of us share the bench seat.
“This is Amos,” Bride says. Amos and I exchange greetings. “Tell him about your hair, Amos. He needs to start to understand.”
“The development of a young person is very delicate,” Amos says. “Interrupt it violently with a powerful mind drug, and that young person will return to certain events again and again throughout their life. Some part of them will fixate for the duration. I was a good black boy in the sixties, never grew my hair long, did drugs, or got into trouble. My dad was obsessed with keeping my hair short, those hippie blacks disgusted him, like they were betraying their Negro Christian identity. But I wanted to grow my hair long. Then I volunteered for MKUltra.” He gives a huge, heaving sigh with a glance at Bride. “Don’t make no difference knowing what the problem is. The passengers on the Titanic knew the problem was a huge rip in the hull, but they still drowned. That’s why the great religion of psychology failed utterly.” He gives me a quick look, turning his vast gray bush to do so, then says, “Right, Doc?”
“Amen,” Bride says.
“I can’t do nothin’ about this obsession.” He turns again to stare at me intensely for a moment as if his personal history has absolved him from normal social restraints. Dr. Bride waits patiently while Amos loses himself in some kind of inner speculation that continues for about five minutes and involves gazing at me in clinical fascination. Only then does he start the truck and we move off.