While I look at him I am aware of my lips forming words, then discarding the words, because no sound comes. Are you ready for this? his expression asks. No, I’m not ready for this, I signal back. Something in me carefully covers up the reference to the women and their babies.
When Amos hands me an oil lamp so I can explore for myself, I discover paintings. I think of the cave paintings at Lascaux, which had so impressed one of my mother’s French clients that he insisted on taking us there. These paintings are fresh, though, and do not depict animals. They are more in the tradition of urban graffiti, with stylized fighter planes, begging Southeast Asian kids, barrels labeled Napalm and Agent Orange, even a street of brothels that could be Soi Cowboy.
Amos leads us a dozen or so paces forward before we are joined by someone who emerges out of the shadows. It is Ben, the Special Forces vet who showed me around the museum. I guess he must have slipped over here after he ran out of the museum. He exchanges a few words with Amos in that language I do not understand. Bride joins in the conversation, speaking the strange dialect in that plummy accent of his. Now we continue.
One by one the other vets emerge from the shadows to greet us. After a few minutes, they have all arrived: Ben, Casey, Herman, Jason, Jerry, Frank, Mario. There is a feeling of a religious procession as we move in a group slowly down into the earth. The cave narrows after about a hundred yards and seems to be tapering before it ends altogether. The frescoes have changed their character; instead of recognizable objects from the modern world, they have become more abstract: serpentine coils twist in and out of each other in ayahuasque patterns. Deeper still, and the snakes grow wings.
–
I am wrong about the cave coming to an end. It narrows to less than the width of a door in a house, so that we have to turn and squeeze past, but it immediately widens again into a spherical space with a ceiling so high it remains invisible. This is the end of the journey into the center of the earth. A sheer wall of limestone faces us across a space in which a single naked male human body lies on a slab. I’m fighting the need to vomit and staring at the Doc, speechless.
“Mat Hawkins,” Amos says. “He died two days ago.” He turns to let Bride speak.
“As I said,” Bride continues, “I had to go back to basics.” He coughs. “We all did it, of course. I mean Homo sapiens. Cannibalism is our primary loss of innocence and at the same time our primary sacrifice and the food supplement that saved us from annihilation in times of famine. Not one early society of humans did not practice it, especially when in pioneer and pilgrim mode. Without it there would be no human race. Naturally, if one is to rebuild the psyche from scratch, one has to return to that moment.”
“Naturally.” I stare at the part-eaten cadaver. “You only ate bits of him?”
“The purpose is sacred and ritualistic-that’s how you purge necessary sin, d’you see? Like eating the body of Christ-a relatively modern and ersatz imitation of the real thing such as we have here. We ingest the dead flesh, give it life again in our own bodies.”
Bride is using a quite different personality as vehicle to convey his mood. He is beyond solemn; it is as if the gargoyle I saw in the van had found its voice.
“Right,” I say, “right,” unable to take my eyes off the long wounds where someone has carved steaks out of Mat Hawkins’s thighs.
Amos has come closer to me and seems to represent the group, who is staring hard at me. Does he get it or not, their eyes demand to know.
Now my mind slips back again to the women and their kids. Were the children brought up here, to this? Something in me doesn’t want to know the answer. I close my mouth.
Bride speaks in a slow priestly tone. “You could say it was a kind of sorcery, one might as well use that word. As the great Carl Jung pointed out, the material world might yield to reason, but the human psyche does not. We are hardwired by the laws of magic, which we desecrate with every logical thought we entertain. Hence the agony of modern man. It was reason got us into this mess, reason that sent half a million to serve as psychopaths over here in Southeast Asia. What could have been more reasonable: We are right, they are wrong, the President is facing an election, our people love war and it makes us rich, so let’s kill them all the way we did the Indians. Only a return to the most basic, magical, reverential springs of human consciousness could heal my damaged band of brothers.”
“Radical,” I say, trying hard not to sound like a reason-crazed modern. “Radical.”
“Yes,” Bride agrees. “Quite right.”
He is still waiting for something to click in my brain. I am still bewildered. What more could there possibly be?
Bride coughs, I think to hide his frustration with me. “It was always a ritual carried out with the utmost respect, a consecration and a sacrament, a literal sharing of our brothers who having given their lives to the community ended by sharing their flesh-the ultimate in selflessness, you might say. The very opposite of narcissism.” I nod. “And to a large extent, it worked-did it not?” The question is addressed to the group.
“Sure did,” Amos says. “We might not look like humanity’s finest, but we’re sure as hell a lot more straightened out now. If it weren’t for all those man steaks, I don’t think we’d all be able to walk and talk at the same time.” A chorus of agreement from the old men. And still the message conveyed by stares and tightening of the lips tells me that I’m just not getting it.
“That’s always the final question, then as now. Does the magic work or not?” Bride is insisting, coming closer to me and towering above me in his need for me to understand. “Even the most reasonable men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency would agree with that. After all, they are in the business of being effective: whatever works has always been their secret motto.”
“Goldman,” I say.
“Correct.” Everyone seems to sigh with relief. For some reason I had to be the first to utter that name.
“Goldman-he followed what you were doing. He got it. But he had no scruples?”
“Keep going,” Bride says.
“The children.” I’ve finally said it, but feel no catharsis, no relief. Neither does Bride or his men. Now that I’ve burst the balloon they look at the floor in shame.
“We had no facilities to bring up kids,” Amos says, his voice sad and angry. “How could we? We were cavemen struggling for survival. You need first-class hygiene for a newborn infant. You need drugs. Not every mother can breast-feed. In conditions like this, in ancient times, only a small percentage of kids survived the first three years.”
“We didn’t want to see the children get sick and die. That wasn’t going to help the therapy,” Bride says. “We’d silenced enough villages where children once played.”
“Goldman took them,” I snap. Amos turns away and Ben begins to whimper. Even the Doc cannot look me in the eye. “You were like a Nazi stud farm, breeding humans for war purposes. How else was the CIA to get its zombies, now the program was in deep cover?” I blow out my cheeks; I am red-faced as the revelation sinks further in. “I think he encouraged you. I think he wanted you all to screw yourselves silly. What a gift for his program: babies no one knows about, with no social identity, invisible kids growing up in a totally controlled environment. Militarily controlled, with guidance from military shrinks.”