The accommodation is a suite in the style of grand hotels of yesteryear: a generous sitting-out area with two chaise longues, brocade wallpaper, a bust from ancient Rome, and an arch that leads directly to the double bed. Dr. Christmas Bride reclines on one of the chaise longues. He faces the street although his eyes suggest his mind is elsewhere. When I pull up a chair to sit next to him he blinks and smiles. “It’s okay, we can talk, I’ve only had the one,” he says slowly in a dreamy voice. He nods at the pipe. “Admitting you need help is a sign of sanity,” Bride murmurs. “After a certain age, though, the help tends to be chemical in nature. People don’t really ease the psychic burdens of others and talking makes it worse.”
The voice remains dreamy, but the mind behind is sharp enough.
“Wormholes,” I say. “You were going to explain them.”
He makes a lazy gesture with one hand, as if he is too blissed out to actually wave it, although that’s sort of what he intends. “Just some crazy idea I thought up when I was young, ambitious, and pretentious. I first suggested it in a paper I wrote for an academic journal. One was allowed so much more imagination in those distant days. I made the wise-ass observation that the cosmos is a creation of human imagination, having all the characteristics of a Rorschach test: the ancients saw gods and goddesses, we see black holes.” He warms to his theme. “What is a black hole? It is the ultimate destroyer, it rips up suns, planets, and galaxies, shreds and destroys them, not even their light can escape-isn’t that exactly the psychology of modern man who produced two world wars and enough weapons of mass destruction to destroy humanity many times over? ’Nam itself was a black hole from which, back in the day, no light escaped.” He pauses for a number of minutes. “But it is also the way out. Perhaps the only way a materialistic consciousness can escape: through total annihilation.”
“Go on.”
“So I decided the only solution was to find one’s own wormhole and follow the path of destruction all the way through the tunnel to the other side. Only one direction was possible, one must allow oneself to drown in the vortex. That, broadly, was my healing method. It was the opposite to everyone else’s. My premise was that after a certain amount of irremediable damage, the mind will never return to factory settings-it has to self-annihilate and rebirth. It needs the wormhole. It needs to disappear like the Cheshire Cat and reappear at another spot in space-time. We needed the jungle.”
“You used acid to probe and heal the damage already done by acid?”
“Yes.”
“Did it work?”
He has reentered his secret world and does not hear the question-yet. It hangs in the air while his eyes glaze over, then become sharp and focused on some inner vision that causes him to tense his body for a moment in concentration. His expression is ruthless, hard and cruel. I’m put in mind again of an ancient gargoyle. All this takes about five minutes, so I’m surprised when he finally says in an affable voice:
“Heartbreaking. Of all of them. What else is there to say? For forty years I witnessed, lived through, the whole catastrophe created mostly by the white man. There was really no other way of looking at it, after a while. It is as if we conquered the world through a brand-new kind of idiocy which the world is now able to reproduce without our help. But it was the white man who through his genocidal madness made possible the great revelation: modern humans do not reacquire undifferentiated consciousness through sitting on our backsides in a lotus position for six years. We’re much too far gone. We have to blow ourselves up and hope someone will put the fragments together again.” He sighs, closes his eyes. “Buddhism is too difficult for most people and Christianity is an incoherent jumble of largely Roman superstition that has nothing to do with the Jew called Jesus. Materialism is dreary: every healthy little girl or boy knows there is a heaven. Goldman and his gang are terrified that Islam will prevail in the end, being the only system offering completeness. I told them if you think like that, then you need a Second Coming to defend yourselves.”
Something has happened in that vast unfathomable mind of his. He is like a boat that hit an invisible rock and is shuddering from the jolt: “D’you know, they took me seriously?”
After a few moments he opens his eyes again and lays his pipe on a small glass table with a wrought-iron base on which all the opium paraphernalia is laid out. I watch him scrape the bowl clean, then prepare the opium. He uses a toothpick to gather up a small amount of black viscous matter from a piece of stiff cellophane and mixes it with some ground-up aspirin, heats the mixture with a butane lighter at the edge of the bowl, and sucks. He is certainly an experienced smoker, to judge from the way he is able to consume the whole smudge of opium in one long inhalation. He tenses himself to concentrate on preparation of the next pipe, which he hands to me at the same time as exhaling his own smoke. Now he relaxes with a long complacent sigh.
“But you already know all this-and much, much more. I’m not being spiritual-just stating a fact. We absorb so very much more than we are conscious of.”
I am looking at him while I fiddle with the lighter. The smoke is smooth and sweet and relaxes the lungs rather than causing me to cough. I close my eyes and there it is: Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is. I hear my own voice as if far away: “You’re saying my father was-is-also the father of children born after me, there, in the camp, to Western women?” The logic comes slowly, fighting my resistance all the way. “So this Asset, he could be related to me?”
“Half brother,” Dr. Bride says in a matter-of-fact tone.
I take a good five minutes to process the information. “It was he who set up this trip? That’s why he left your number on the iPhone. He wanted me to know…everything.”
“I had no idea what he was up to. He is in an important transition phase and close to escape velocity, psychically speaking. Your phone call shocked me. In the end he left me no choice. He is driven, d’you see? In spite of everything, he has one very simple human need.”
“For what?”
“Love, of course.”
26
Next morning I rejoined Dr. Bride in his suite. Given his repertoire of personalities, I was curious as to who he might be after his opium binge. What I found first was an elderly and kindly sage, in awe of the life he had led. As an identity it was not particularly convincing; as a posture, though, it was highly attractive. I was put in mind not of the man he really was so much as the man he might have been if not for ’Nam.
“I’ve ordered breakfast,” he said. “Shall we have it on the balcony?”
We shifted chairs around a small marble table, then the breakfast arrived: stainless steel coffee and milk pots, Danish pastries, croissants, pains au chocolat, cheese, eggs, and cold cuts. The waiter poured the coffee and left.
“Myths,” Dr. Christmas Bride said. “One really cannot do without them. How are you on Faust?”
“Faust? Pact with the devil?”
“Exactly,” the Doctor said.
“Oh, Buddha.”
“Yes, quite,” Bride said. He waved a hand at the assorted clumps of humans down below in the square in front of the Opera House. “Look at them,” he said, “What do they all have in common?”
“Not a lot,” I muttered.
“On the contrary, they have one vital thing in common. They are all more or less innocent. The tourists, the beggars, the cyclo riders, they all look out on the world with innocence and bewilderment. The poor are bewildered by their suffering, the wealthy by their privileges, but none really want to do harm, in their own way they all want to return to the same heaven you and I visited last night. We inherit a quite manic certainty that such happiness is possible, indeed it always seems to be just around the corner. All great thinkers have wondered at this mystery-except the modern ones. Something about industrial societies causes us to despise innocence at the same time as encouraging everyone to pursue happiness, when it’s perfectly obvious you can’t have one without the other. It’s very odd.”