A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (19 page)

In the end, he put a bullet through his brain, killing all those things he hated with such vehemence.

There was nothing to feel for Jim Jones but a sure, steady loathing. It was harder to think about the people of Jonestown. Many of them had suffered in America, and they had turned to Jim Jones for help.

I remembered sitting with Odell Rhodes just after he had come back from identifying bodies. Another survivor asked him if he had seen a certain woman who had been very special and very dear. Odell said he hadn’t seen her. The lie was transparent.

Later, Odell told me about it. She had written on her arm in ball-point pen, “Jim Jones is the only one.” It was better to think she had been murdered.

Having a theory about it helped some. Mine was that
Jones was paranoid, in the clinical sense, and that he infected others. The mechanism of
folie imposée
was magnified by the classic techniques of brainwashing. The mass suicides of history—Masada (the hilltop fortress where, in 73
A.D.
, nearly one thousand Jews killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans) and Saipan (under invasion from American forces, one thousand Japanese took their lives in 1944)—had occurred when a people were under siege and surrounded by enemies. Jones and the people of Jonestown were no exception: for months they had been harassed, persecuted, surrounded, and besieged by shadow forces. When the final attack was imminent and undeniable, they chose to die.

I
assumed in Curacao I might finally get more than two hours of sleep. Since Tuesday, November twenty-eighth, the day after the planeload of newsmen visited Jonestown, there hadn’t been much to do except sit around the Graham Greene Room and touch bases for the third or fourth time with the survivors. The problem was that we had been pushing so hard, we’d been so charged with adrenaline, that it was hard to break the inertia. One network TV crew was filming a cockroach crawling across the floor. They had the lights on it and the camera going, and the soundman was crawling along next to it with a microphone.

A few of the survivors were charging for interviews, and it seemed to me that some of them sold their exclusive story several times. (When one reporter phoned his editor in New York and asked, “What am I authorized to offer?” the editor replied, “Offer him a glass of Kool-Aid.”) I didn’t pay anyone, but I didn’t begrudge them the money. It was the first time many of them had had cash in their pockets in years, and some hired prostitutes from a nearby brothel to stay with them, there at the Park Hotel.

Some people—other survivors and newsmen—were outraged
by the situation. It struck me differently. I remembered the attitude toward sex at Jonestown, and I saw that these men and women treated each other with affection. In some way it seemed to me a bittersweet affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.

I
n William Boyd’s bright novel of exquisite embarrassment,
A Good Man in Africa
, the protagonist, a British foreign-service official, finds himself, for a series of convoluted reasons, naked in the jungle, voiding his bladder on a column of ants, and listening to the “moronic unvaried
churrup
of crickets.…

“ ‘One man against nature,’ he said to himself in a deep American accent, ‘nood, in the African farst.’ For a second or two he tried to imagine himself thus exposed, a creature of pure instinct. The setting was right: dusk, heat, foliage, animal noise, mysterious crepitations in the undergrowth. But he was wrong. What would anyone think if they saw him? A naked overweight freckled white man …” ludicrously nude and barely human.

So it is with noodity in the farst: the fragile illusion of omnipotence and grace collapsing in the presence of a single witness, even the mere thought of one.

I know this for a fact. One summer day in Innsbruck, Austria, I was the only passenger on the chairlift to the top of the mountain. From the top of the lift I hiked for several hours, walking alone above the tree line until I found a sunny spot for lunch. There was no one about, and I stripped off my clothes and sprawled on the hot rocks, soaking up the sun. Sometime after eating, I remember standing on a boulder, looking down on small spots of color that
were the houses of Innsbruck, far below. How insignificant were civilization and its discontents. And I … I was a giant of a man, towering above all that was petty and small; a man naked and unashamed; a man in tune with the power of nature, in tune with—

“Fal der reeeeeeee …”

The singing was coming from some short distance below.

“Fal der raaaaaaaa …”

The voices were high and pure and sweet: children’s voices. I had thought I was alone but had not counted on the Austrians’ love of hiking.

“Fal der reeeeeeee …”

The song was louder now, and the children were very close. The trail passed directly under the rock where I stood, and my clothes were twenty yards away, somewhere on the other side of the rocky path. I considered a frantic dash, then discarded the idea, certain that my body, such as it is, was not one of the wonders of nature these children had climbed a mountain to see. Soon they would be topping the ridge and coming around the bend. Miserably naked, I crouched behind a rock, holding my breath. And here they came, a kind of Scout troop, twelve-year-old boys and girls together, led by a stout, muscular man in lederhosen and knee socks.

“FAL DER RA HA HA HA HA HA …”

An entirely naked man, crouched in shame and fear behind a rock, is obliged to consider the symbology of Genesis. In the second chapter of the Good Book, before their expulsion from the Garden, Adam and Eve were “both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Good for them. But soon they began humanity on its passage from a state of innocence and bliss into the knowledge of evil, misery, fast food, and North Dakota. Driven from the Garden and possessed of guilty knowledge, Adam and Eve gathered up fig leaves and made themselves aprons. (Try that on a talus slope a few thousand feet above Innsbruck.) When God called them, they hid, because, as Adam later explained, “I was afraid, because I was naked …”

All of us, religious or not, seem to have some dim vision
of the Garden, an archetype that lives in the racial memory as surely as the fear of falling or the hatred of lawyers. Nearly five thousand years ago, in what is now southern Iraq, the people of the land of Sumer developed the world’s first written language. One of the grand Sumerian epics concerned an earthly paradise—probably located in southwest Persia—where the first man and woman went proudly naked. According to cuneiform script scratched into rock five millennia ago, the first couple was persuaded by a fox to eat one of eight fruits that had been specifically forbidden to them. Big mistake. The landlord evicted the couple, and their descendants were forced to wear message T-shirts and designer jeans.

Ever since, cultured individuals have equated clothing with civilization. Once, in Africa, I talked to a colleague who had applied to visit the pygmies of the Ituri forest. The bureaucrat who denied the application, my friend discovered later, routinely forbade journalists to visit the Ituri. He believed that depictions of the pygmies’ lives would be detrimental to the image of Zaire and make it appear less than completely civilized to the rest of the world. “They wear few clothes and you will surely be offended,
n’est-ce pas?
” the bureaucrat had said, frowning intently. The bureaucrat, my friend told me, wore a double-knit leisure suit.

When supposedly civilized individuals are discovered nood, in the farst, charitable people simply assume they are insane. Something like this happened to the writer Farley Mowat when he traveled up above the Arctic Circle to study wolves several decades ago. In his memoir of a season with the wolves,
Never Cry Wolf
, Mowat writes about a warm August day on the tundra: “I decided to take advantage of the weather and have a swim and get some sun on my pallid skin, so I went off a few hundred yards from the Eskimo camp (modesty is the last of the civilized vices which a man sheds in the wilds), stripped, swam, and then climbed a nearby ridge and lay down to sun-bathe.”

In Carroll Ballard’s brilliant cinematic version of
Never Cry Wolf
, Charles Martin Smith, the actor playing Mowat, dozes, then wakes to find himself in the middle of a huge,
migrating caribou herd. Rather than lose the opportunity to study the interaction of wolf and caribou firsthand, Smith, entirely naked but for his boots, runs with predator and prey, a scene of beauty and splendid savagery.

What Ballard chose not to film was the aftermath of the chase. “I gave it up then,” Mowat wrote, “and turned for home.… I saw several figures running toward me, and I recognized them as the Eskimo woman and her three youngsters. They seemed to be fearfully distraught about something. They were all screaming, and the woman was waving a two-foot-long snowknife while her three offspring were brandishing deer spears and skinning knives.”

Mowat sprinted back to his camp, pulled on his pants, and picked up his rifle. Later, when things had quieted down, he learned that the woman had heard from one of her sons that the wolf man had gone galloping out over the hills, quite naked. “She, brave soul, assumed that I had gone out of my mind (Eskimos believe that no white man has very far to go in that direction), and was attempting to assault a pack of wolves barehanded and bare everything else. Calling up the rest of her brood and snatching up what weapons were at hand, she had set out to rescue me.”

I was thinking about this story, about the Garden, and about conditions inside Austrian jails, as the parade of revoltingly cheerful children marched by my rock, singing like little banshees. It took them weeks to pass. I yearned for dwarfdom and wished the children of Austria mortification and porridge for dinner.

“Fal der reeeeeeee …”

When the little cretins were finally gone and I could hear them only faintly, I found my clothes and started trudging mournfully down the mountain, thinking uncharitable thoughts. The Garden is a secret spot and one not gladly shared. It took me fifteen full minutes in a pair of pants before the situation began to seem even vaguely amusing.

S
eattle in the sun is splendid, but Interstate 5 this day was slick and the rain fell like a fine mist. To say it was raining in Seattle is like pointing out that bears tend to relieve themselves in remote wooded areas. People who live in Seattle have a puddle on the back stoop 365 days a year, and some experts attribute a significant portion of the city’s suicides to its damp and pearly, sunless skies. I have always imagined that Venus, under its cloud cover, would look like an infrared Seattle. Grappling with these morbid and otherworldly thoughts, I turned east, where the weather got worse.