Dr. Bride looks up at the ceiling of the cave. “He promised our girls first-class health care, prenatal and postnatal, he brought in military doctors who had practiced obstetrics-there weren’t many of those, naturally.”
“You have to remember these girls already had their heads turned upside down,” Amos says.
“Marilyn Loren,” Ben sobs, “she was the best, the most beautiful-and the most fucked-up.”
“A certain kind of mental breakdown makes women especially voracious,” Bride says. “It’s quite well known. Vivien Leigh had it. Used to pop out to the park for quickies. A lot of the girls were like that. And at the end of the day, if the girl wants a baby, she gets one.”
“No way they could have taken care of the babies, though,” Amos says.
“They were taken away from their mothers-at birth?” I ask. “Soon after? They never knew maternal love?”
“He wanted to start with clean slates,” Bride says. “And he got them.” He shakes his head. “What could we do? As Amos said, no way the girls could have stayed here and taken care of their own kids, and neither could we. We were all already crazy.”
I nod. Once you enter into the logic, things fall into place. “A dozen or so young women horny as hell among more than a hundred men-and no contraception?”
“The women didn’t want it. Most of them wanted to give birth at least once. The instinct doesn’t respect difficulties like jungle locations-not with women like that whose heads have been tampered with. And they knew their lives were over. Giving birth was the one remaining human thing they could do.” He sighs. “Giving birth is a woman’s trump card, you have to let her play it, you really have no choice in the matter.”
“It must have been one big baby factory.”
As I cast my eye over the huge vault of the cave, the slab with the half-eaten cadaver, the ragged faces of the old men, I see ancient connections. It is as if we had all been in this space before, many thousands of years ago.
“I need to get out of here,” I say.
The journey back to the light is all uphill. A romantic streak in me expects catharsis; what I experience when we emerge from the cave is an attack of depression. Bride seems to understand. He even seems worried about me.
“I don’t want you to get sick,” he says. “That’s always a risk at moments like this. Let’s go back to the future.”
–
“So where did it happen, the other side of the experiment, the indoctrination, the black magic?” I asked, trying to sound casual, as we made our way back to the camp.
“Where do you think?” Bride said.
“Not Angkor?”
“Why not? For a brief but sufficient moment Goldman was able to grab what he needed. Pol Pot didn’t take it over until the mid-seventies-by then Goldman had refined his technique. He could reproduce the conditions elsewhere.”
“I still find it hard to understand, a modern American military man like him delving into superstition.”
“Sorcery works. Human sacrifice is behind all great powers. Look at the U.S.: twelve million native Americans slaughtered, that’s more than Hitler or Stalin-and look how well they’ve done. The entire nation is testimony to the efficacy of the practice.” He throws me a glance. “It’s simply a matter of dumping the delusion of reason and seeing the human condition for what it is. In reality there is nothing reasonable about us at all-and very little that is humane. One would have thought two world wars proved that. We dream we are rich, happy, and good while the economy is healthy. It only takes a terrorist bomb or two to pop the bubble, however, and we’re back to cave mentality.”
I began to speak. Perhaps it was a reflex of shock, because I was mumbling mostly to myself, working it out: “The Asset, that’s why he kills and terrorizes. It’s not an unfortunate by-product of his programming, it’s built into his training-from birth. Goldman overcame the zombie effect by creating a voracious psychopath. He has to have his red meat. That’s what Goldman was doing on the river that day. It wasn’t a mere demonstration, it was feeding time for his tiger. That’s why they needed Sakagorn-someone with that kind of authority and charm, an aristocrat who commands deference in a feudal society, and with tons of slush money to keep people quiet.”
24
“There were two hundred and thirty-three of us at the peak,” Dr. Christmas Bride says as the truck trundles slowly through the jungle tunnel with Amos at the wheel. “Including a dozen American women, all of them white.”
His somber mood has quite dissipated; he is a scientist again, fascinated by his life’s work. Now the plight of the women and their children doesn’t seem so sad to him. On the contrary, the circumstance was serendipitous, looked at from a scientific point of view.
“It was before your time, of course, a distant epoch when men were men and women were women.” He smiles. “I have nothing against gender equality, nothing at all, but as a psychiatrist I have to say that if you go about it by degrading the sexual identity of both male and female, you end up with infantilism. After all, in nature the only humans without developed gender identity are infants. Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation.”
“Why so?”
“Think about it, what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry-but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively. In the end they grumble and obey. Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand. It is almost as if the West has been softened up for that very purpose by forces beyond its control.”
“You got that right,” Amos says, at the wheel and concentrating on the track.
“So what about the others, the GIs in your care? Where did they all go? You surely didn’t eat them all?”
“ ‘Some flew east, some flew west, some flew over the cuckoo’s nest,’ ” he quotes. “Natural wastage-people without hope die young. Many were too far gone for anyone to save them. One used whatever drugs would keep them calm, if that was what they wanted. I never discouraged them from taking their own lives, once I was sure that’s what they intended. The simple truth is that mental pain may be as unendurable as the physical kind-indeed, it may be much worse. I was working in uncharted waters, I had to take each case as it came and after a year or so make a decision. Some simply wandered off into the jungle. One assumes they died, but not necessarily-after all, many of them were skilled jungle survivors. One heard rumors from time to time about crazed vets wandering the jungle and using crossbows to hunt for food.”
“So now there are eight?”
He hesitates, then looks at me, waiting for something. “Eight plus three.”
“Those three derelicts living in Klong Toey Slum?”
Dr. Bride sighs. “It’s really very simple. The man who believes he is your father led two of his chums to Bangkok. It was a kind of last adventure before death, and a bid to reach back to his personal history before Ultra. For him you exist on the far shore of the sea of madness.” He stares at me, then looks away. “Someone had brought news of a Eurasian detective in Bangkok, just the right age, with a mother named Nong.” His eyes examine me again for a second. “He took Willie J. Schwartz and Larry Krank, to use their official names, who were the three most able to appear normal in public, and they all went off to see if they could find a way of making a living in the world. They wound up doing a little trafficking in Bangkok, in the slum of Klong Toey. They kept very little for themselves, sent most of what they made back to their brothers in the compound. Jack was shy about contacting you, though. He was biding his time. He found out where you worked and spied on you there. He asked about you, but you have to understand he was like a jungle animaclass="underline" cautious, shy, given to scuttling away at the first sign of psychic danger. He took a few pictures of you, I’m told, on a cell phone, and stared at them for hours on end.”