“You gotta blow them away, you have no choice. You can’t be who you are and let them be who they are. It don’t work. Someone has to die.” He raises his voice again, making it crack. “We coulda won, you know?”
“Won what, the genocide?”
He blinks rapidly. “Yeah. The genocide. Why not? It’s only the first time you kill that you feel bad.” He stamps his foot. “So, why didn’t we just drop the Bomb on Hanoi?” He stares at me, distraught. “I could have been standing here a winner, instead of a loser.”
I am afraid of him, this crazy old man, so I say nothing. The suffering of a crazy possesses an unnerving authenticity that can make you feel like a fraud in your fragile sanity. Is it because we know deep down that a divided mind is perhaps the only honest reaction to a cleft world? Sorry, R, these are jungle thoughts, I’ll be okay once I’m out of here.
Or will I? There’s an atmosphere of finality in the camp that creeps up on you, as if this were the hidden endgame I have been postponing all these years.
A groan starts somewhere deep in Ben’s chest, and ends with a scream. “You trying to fuck with my head, boy? You trying to fuck me up all over again? We weren’t supposed to lose.” Now he weeps. “We could have had a victory parade just like after World War Two. The whole of New York would have turned out to honor us.”
Now I cannot stand any more. I am pulling him toward the exit by grabbing the strap of his dungarees. He forces a halt in front of the “Napalm Girl,” who is running naked toward the camera, her body burning with the chemical that has stuck to her. Ben bursts into tears. Now he is running toward the exit. I race after him, but when I pull open the door of the hut, there is no sign of him.
I have to go back in. I stop in front of a photograph of an eighty-five-year-old woman in a wheelchair leading ten thousand people in a march from Berkeley to Oakland on November 25, 1965; she carries a banner with the legend My Son Died in Vain, Don’t Go to War, Go to Prison. Black-and-white pix of marches and demonstrations from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, France, Britain, the USSR. Now I see close-ups of Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn, two helicopter pilots raised to the level of superheroes: they saved the lives of ten Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. In November 1965, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison, and Alice Herz soaked themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire outside U.S. government buildings. Here is the wall of the intellectuals, led by Bertrand Russell of the U.K., giving finely articulated reasons why the war must end. A telegram sent by Ho Chi Minh to “American Friends” on the occasion of 1968 New Year’s. Finally, a distraught young woman, on her knees, weeps over the dead body of a fellow student at Kent State University.
The one that grabs me the most, though, is a highly colored, deliberately amateurish poster by vets who opposed the war: Don’t go, the U.S. Government will turn you into a psychopath.
–
Outside the hut it has started to rain with the sudden violence of the tropics. I stand in the downpour and shiver. Now a tall, wild figure, also without protection from the rain, appears from behind one of the other huts, cupping a lighted cigarette.
“Ben flipped, didn’t he? Captain America took over, I suppose? You must forgive him-and forgive me, too,” he says. “I hope you understand why we had to do that?” He gives a good strong pull on the Camel.
“What is a wormhole?”
“I’ll tell you in the truck on the way back. The point was that you should see where everyone is coming from.”
“Everyone?”
He looks at me. “Yes. The Asset included.”
23
I follow Bride down a narrow path through the jungle opposite the main entrance. We stop on the edge of a clearing where crops have been grown in the past, but not recently: another long hut on blocks, but without windows and with locks more serious than those on the other huts. The Doctor points at it: “That was my lab, for four decades.” He shakes his head. “Four decades. The first ten years are about adaptation, organization, hierarchy, the sophistication of food gathering and preparation and water retrieval. After that people need something beyond mere survival. And that’s normal people who haven’t been severely damaged. In the Middle Ages in Europe nearly half the year was taken up with religious holidays, which often degenerated into orgies. We needed a structure, d’you see? But what? There were no examples we could use from modern times. Or even medieval times. Or even ancient Roman times.” As he ticks off the millennia he studies my face, searching for the light of understanding and finding none.
“One had to reach right back to the very wellsprings of the human psyche.”
“Eleusis?” I ask.
He gives a tolerant smile. “A good guess and, I confess, the thought crossed my mind. But you have to remember ancient Greece was an upstart civilization patched together with half-understood philosophies stolen from Egypt and Persia. Greece was the New World of the time, the older cultures laughed with contempt at the superficiality of clowns like Plato.”
He leads me from the hut to a footpath, where we surprise Amos of the big hair. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as we emerged. He was standing behind a tree. The tree was too thin for his hair, though. Now he comes out, smiling, as if trying to pretend he wasn’t spying. Dr. Bride grins.
“See what I mean about espionage?” He jerks a chin at the black man. “Amos is an artist. He’s excited that you’re about to witness his masterpieces-and he’s also shy. Is that not so, Amos, my dear friend?”
“Once a shrink always a shrink,” Amos says, shaking his head.
He leads away from the camp, along a well-worn path that brings us to some karst formations that perhaps once amounted to small limestone hills, but have been eroded so that the mineral outcrops are no higher than the trees. The karst, though, has produced a cave system with an entrance at ground level behind a Bodhi tree. We pause for a moment.
“Caves are where we started. We must put ourselves in the bodies of our most distant ancestors. Imagine a brain just as efficient as our own, probably more so since it had to be more alert to survive. Now consider how this brain developed expertise in cave management and technology over more than fifty thousand years. According to some, as long as two hundred thousand-that’s a hundred and ninety-six thousand years before recorded history. What were we doing all that time, with those marvelous big brains of ours?” Bride stares at me, waiting for a response.
“I guess we got pretty good on caves.”
“They’re in our DNA. If we’re honest and relaxed, merely entering a cave does something to our heads. I’m not talking mysticism, just the basic law of programming. There’s no way caves don’t evoke something from deep within. Right, Amos?”
Amos nods and moves his gaze from Bride to the mouth of the cave, then back to me. “He’s right. It really started with the cave.”
“But before the rituals could be established, there was work to be done. Hard work.”
“Had to shovel shit for six months before we reached the end,” Amos said.
The black man shares a glance with the Doc, who nods. Amos leads us into the shadows. Once we cross a certain line, though, I see there is illumination.
The cave is so deep we cannot see to the end. Indeed, it gives the impression of infinity because there are oil lamps set at about ten yards apart that form a double line like the lights on a landing strip; the lamps seem to continue, endlessly, into the bowels of the earth. My mind flicks through available references and produces a memory of the caves of Cu Chi, dug mostly by women.
“Did the women also work here? You said some of the casualties of MKUltra were female?”
A strange look comes over Bride’s face. “Yes,” he says gently, as if he feels sorry for me. “But not much. You see, most of them fell pregnant within the first year. They were keen to work, they were good American stock with the Puritan ethic still operating, somehow, but we couldn’t allow them to risk the babies, could we?”