–
Once we’re on our way I see why we need a truck like this. Huge ruts in the track from the wet season would destroy any other kind of vehicle. And the jungle is so dense, you’d probably need a gallon of napalm for each square foot to clear it. Progress is slow, therefore, and nobody speaks for an hour or so. Little by little the mood of both my companions changes. Mine changes, too, but in the opposite direction. They relax somewhat and Amos shares his chore by saying things like, Damn close, wow that weren’t here last year. Doc Bride grunts back in a friendly tone. I, on the other hand, feel the oppression of the jungle just as if I were bouncing around on the bottom of a green ocean on an alien planet with extraterrestrials as companions.
21
Finally the truck stops at the end of the track. An iron arc forms a vault over an entrance and carries the legend:
I AM IS THE PRISON THAT MAKES YOU FREE
I look at the Doc, who looks embarrassed. “ ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ ” he quotes.
“What does it mean?”
“Don’t remember.”
Amos jumps out to open two heavy iron gates while we wait with the engine running. “The gates used to open automatically, but that was before the last generator packed up,” Bride explains. “Somehow the natural evolution of our community caused us to give up on fixing things.” He points to a water tower on iron scaffolding. “We used to have an electric pump, now they use the emergency hand pump that’s been repaired a dozen times. A lot of work, but it’s something to do.”
Once inside the compound I see there are no walls or fences other than the impenetrable jungle. The three of us jump out and the Doc helps Amos close the gates behind us. Now that we have entered the camp this wizened old man takes center stage like a king who has returned to his castle.
We are inside a large flat space comprising a closed village of long single-story wood huts on concrete pillars to keep them off the jungle floor. Many have been joined together longitudinally to make a kind of railway carriage fifty yards long or more. Streets are formed between them with overhead awnings to protect from rain and sun, and there are elevated boardwalks to keep people above the mud during the wet season. The compound suffers from a sense of neglect and decay; jungle grass has sprouted around most of the huts, gravel pathways are overrun with weeds. Only a few of the huts have the appearance of habitations; the others are run-down to the point of collapse. One near the jungle wall has succumbed to creepers and the roof has caved in the grip of a vegetable boa constrictor. There doesn’t seem to be any people around.
“They’ll arrive one by one,” Bride whispers, scanning the compound. I am put in mind of a nature documentary where the wildlife expert whispers into the camera with religious reverence. “They’ve seen you, that’s what’s holding them back. It’s not fear, exactly.”
“What, then?”
“Shyness. Very few strangers come here, we lost the knack of talking to outsiders pretty soon after we started. Naturally, now I live in Saigon I’ve retrieved my social body.” He checks my face to see how I react to the phrase social body, which is a Buddhist concept, used mostly by Tibetans. “Also”-he scratches his face-“we’re all conscious of being weird. You can be sure they’re watching you. They won’t come out until they’re sure you’re okay.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing. They’ll read you from a distance.”
“You lived here full-time?”
“Certainly. There was no other way. It was the valley of the blind and I owned one good eye.”
I shiver: here live souls who were inches away from total destruction by the ones they most trusted. Aggravated rape of the mind. No one has ever been punished.
Now I notice there is an empty circle in the middle of the compound, the interior of which has been carefully cleaned and scraped and covered with gravel. The Doc indicates with his chin that I should stand there while he and Amos go off behind one of the huts.
After about five minutes a man in denim dungarees appears: a few wisps of white hair that must once have been blond, broken veins in a sensitive north European skin, a posture of deep humility bordering on meekness, a straggly white beard. I would put him in his mid- to late sixties. He looks deeply at me but says nothing. He continues to stare at me from watery blue eyes without speaking while, one by one, other inmates appear from different directions. They emerge from behind the cabins, or perhaps out of them, it’s impossible to say.
There are seven of them, not including Amos or the Doc. In each case they walk slowly, warily, but at the same time with a sense of propriety: this is their space. They are all between the ages of sixty and seventy, dressed similarly in denims, with jungle attitude. Those with hair have grown it long and tied it in a ponytail. Most have not shaved for decades and have acquired long, unkempt spade beards not dissimilar to those of holy men of the Himalayas, but to me they most resemble rednecks from remote hamlets somewhere in Alabama. They stare and wait about ten yards away from me without speaking or moving. Behind them I see the Doc and Amos watching from some distance, leaning against a hut. Now one of them steps forward and starts to sniff me. He steps back after quite a few inhalations in which he seems to be examining my odor. Now another steps forward and does the same thing. One by one they all have a good sniff, then retire to the edge of the circle: I guess identity is established by odor here in the jungle. When I check their faces I see in each the same tormented speculation on some problem of inner space.
There are no words exchanged at all between this close-knit community, but a decision seems to have been collectively taken when the first old man steps forward. He looks into my eyes. Without offering a hand he says, “I’m Ben.”
“I’m Sonchai,” I reply, squinting at them in disbelief. Now they take a single step forward, one by one.
“Casey.”
“Herman.”
“Jason.”
“Jerry.”
“Frank.”
“Mario.”
Ben starts to speak in the wavering voice of someone who rarely uses words at all and seems to be delivering a set speech in a language half forgotten.
“I had a vision. She was a combination of Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. Doesn’t matter if you think of her as Marilyn Loren, or Sophia Monroe, doesn’t matter at all. That’s the way with wormholes. It doesn’t matter, see? My vision encompassed the beauty of both those women, and all the other good women in the world, it was just a perfect, glowing female love, two kinds of woman in one body, and Marilyn Loren was standing at the top of an iron staircase, a kind of platform at the top of the staircase, and I climbed up to it, driven by pure love I climbed up to it, to that platform where she was waiting, then I realized I’d made a slight mistake, she was actually on another platform, a little higher up, but when I got to the next platform I saw I’d made the same mistake, and so on. Over and over. And this obsessed me. Long after they’d done screwing with my head it obsessed me, this pure love that had come to me while they were training me to kill people. But without Marilyn Loren, life had no meaning for me-none at all. She was the only thing left in my head that I had put there myself. It took the Doc to explain that I’d gotten stuck in infinity. In his system infinity is a thing you can get stuck in. Just as your body can get stuck in a doorway, so your mind gets stuck by-” He stops himself, begins again. “It turned out that Marilyn Loren was my wormhole. That was the living agony at the center of the corpse.”