He steps back to the edge of the circle to let a brother step forward.
“Hi, I’m Casey.” His hair is tied back with a piece of string and his Amish beard extends to the center of his chest. “I loved dogs, so they made me kill one, slowly, when I was on acid,” he says, tears streaming down his face and wetting his beard. “That’s how they got me. Dogs were my wormhole. I killed lots of people, too, but only after they made me kill the dog.”
Another steps forward. “Hello, I’m Jason. Want to know why I stayed in the body? I saw this was not life, but death. This sojourn in the body is death. So why be in a hurry to die? We’ll all soon be free anyway. But I can’t stand to be with people who don’t know they’re dead. It fucks my head up so bad, I have to run away. Do you know you’re dead? I can’t tell. You kind of look like you do and you look like you don’t, both at the same time.”
One by one they step forward to deliver their harrowing stories, then stand back. Now it is my turn to speak.
“I’m just a beginner here,” I say, almost paralyzed by the sense of weirdness. “I’ve come to learn. I would like to know more.”
This gambit has a strange effect on the group. They stare and stare at me as if I’m crazy and they scratch their heads. Finally, Ben says, “Really?”
“Yes,” I say. “Really.”
Small talk has no place here. It seems I’ve said something with serious implications that I cannot myself unravel. They frown and study me. When discomfort makes me walk around the circle holding my chin, trying to come to terms with the weirdness of the camp, they follow me with their eyes and hold their chins, as if I am a stage act. As if I have an answer. I finally exclaim, “Will you stop staring at me, please?”
Instantly they drop their eyes, as if ashamed of themselves. “We’re sorry,” Ben says. “See, for us you’re something very special.”
“Yep,” another agrees. “Very special.”
General murmurs of agreement.
“Would you mind telling me why?”
“ ’Cause you said you wanted to learn. Nobody else ever said that to us. Anyone who visited didn’t want to know scat-they just wanted to get the hell out.”
At this they all nod their heads gravely.
“What is a wormhole?”
The question has the effect of making them laugh and grin. “Didn’t the Doc tell you?” Ben asks.
“No, the Doc didn’t tell me.”
“Well he darn well should have,” another says.
“Doc’s messin’ with your head if he didn’t tell you.”
“So why don’t you tell me?”
Ben scratches his head. “For us, it’s not verbal.” More nods of agreement. “No way a man with an active wormhole can talk about it.”
“And we all got them.”
“Even the Doc.”
“Even you, probably, or you wouldn’t have come.”
“That’s right. And you sure wouldn’t want to learn from us if you didn’t have your own wormhole.”
Silence. I wonder where Dr. Christmas Bride has hidden himself. The men speak in mutters inaudible to me, then Ben steps forward.
“We can’t explain wormholes, but we can show you the original.”
“Right,” they agree in a mumble.
“We call it the Great Wormhole, but it’s not really.”
“Right. The Great Wormhole is life on earth.”
“But that’s too big an idea for us. So we stop the investigation at our great wormhole, even though in reality it’s only local to us.”
“Exactly.”
Now I’ve lost the plot entirely-or they have. “So,” I say, “let’s go. Let’s go find the Great Wormhole.”
“Really?” Ben says.
“Sure,” I say.
They mumble together some more in their impenetrable dialect. “We’re scared it might totally freak you out,” Ben explains. “They demand that I warn you it might freak you out. Not the same as the way it freaks us out, but just the same…”
“I’ll take my chances. My head and I have been through a lot together.”
This makes them chuckle.
“He says his head and him have been through a lot together.”
Now they are all looking at me fondly and chuckling.
Without another word Ben leads me to one of the huts at the far end of the compound. It is just about intact, although it looks as if it might succumb to the jungle within a year. Above the door someone has painted in crude letters the legend Great Wormhole. Underneath are the words Museum of American War Atrocities. I stop to stare at Ben.
“We copied the one in Saigon,” Ben explains. “All the exhibits are from original pictures, but we couldn’t reproduce the glass jars with ground stoppers they keep the Agent Orange fetuses in, so we just took photographs. It’s pretty much a faithful reproduction-except for the name, of course. You go to Saigon now, it’s called the War Remnants Museum.” He pauses before entering. With a gesture of resignation, as if to say, Here, you might as well know it all, he slips a hand into an inside pocket and takes out a very worn snapshot. “The Doc encourages each of us to carry one, so we can remember who we’re not anymore. He keeps a snapshot of himself just the same.”
There are plenty of creases in it and the color has faded, but it is still possible to recognize the muscular and rather beautiful young man with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, holding an M-16 and looking stoned. He is not in uniform, however; his magnificent shoulders and biceps are left bare except for the straps of his dungarees.
“Special Forces?”
He stares at me with such stress that I wonder if he is going to explode. Then he starts to relax again. “Yeah, that’s right. I was the kind who volunteered for everything. Volunteered once too often. Special Forces, then MKUltra. Ultra liked to recruit from Special Forces. Never thought it would be my head that caved, though. Never thought Uncle Sam himself would do that to me.”
His features go through a complex rolling ritual that ends with an expression of psychotic wonder. It is a war, certainly, that is playing across his face and, I suppose, the rest of his body, nerves tensing and relaxing, the left fighting the right, one side of his face malevolent, the other retaining the gentle resignation of old age. Old age wins. The violence subsides. It was as if I could experience his demons, watch them do battle with angels, lose the fight, and slink away: Armageddon shrunk to a few ivory cells in one man’s brain. Now he looks up at me.
“We can go in now. I’m okay with it now. I think.”
22
Memory, of course, is notorious for its power to deceive. Nevertheless, I am certain Ben and his brothers have faithfully reproduced the museum that I first visited in Saigon with my mother, Nong, all those years ago. Walking ramrod straight, and a little too fast, Ben takes me to what I suppose is his favorite exhibit: a photograph of a giant thousand-gallon tank of Agent Orange, which carries the legend The Giant Purple People Eater.
“This is where we turned Nazi,” Ben announces loudly. He has become suddenly officious, a different person entirely; stress works all his features. His words pierce the somnambulant state I seem to have slipped into. “Did you know we had to refine napalm to make it better stick to human skin? It stuck especially well to the tender skin of young children.”
“No,” I hear myself saying, as if underwater. “No, I did not know that.”
A kind of panic overcomes him, like someone who suffers from claustrophobia. He marches us through the rest of the exhibits at a fast walking pace-the My Lai massacre; victims of Agent Orange; the picture I saw on my first visit with Nong all those years ago (exactly as I remembered: an athletic-looking GI, an M-16 in his left hand, his right holding the torso of an enemy fighter, which is hardly more than skin plus head hanging upside down; the GI is laughing hysterically).
Now Ben is glaring at me. I am put in mind of crazies who throw tantrums for no apparent reason: a sudden resurgence of uncontrollable rage waiting for a trigger.