Bible of the Dead (29 page)

Chapter 33

Jake said:

‘What?’

Barnier exhaled smoke. Eagerly.

‘I will explain the rest. But we need all the information. First tell me your story. Tell me what you have found.’

Jake still wasn’t quite there. But he’d had enough of being quiet: so he told Julia and Barnier his side of things, to distract himself. He gave them the whole story of his meeting with Chemda and their flight from Bangkok and the janitor and Pol Pot’s grave and even the
krasue
. As he did he fidgeted and sweated, looking anxiously up and down the soi at the durian seller and the mango woman and the cackling and pouting ladyboys, the
katoeys
, the transsexual hookers, with their cheekbones and lipstick and weird tallness and their supertweaked hair: they were like the pirated copies of women, like the fake Chanel handbags of women. Brilliant imitations, yet not quite right.

Barnier exhaled smoke as Jake concluded his narrative. Then he spoke up:

‘There we have it, that makes it all fit together. Finally! You see I too have been doing my own thinking, my own investigation, so, with what you have told me – and of course Julia’s decisive conceptions – I believe we have the total answer.’

‘Which is?’

‘Let’s go back in history, once again. We know that eighty years ago or whenever, Stalin and the Soviets began a long long campaign, to try and create man-animal hybrids, powerful but biddable, strong, guilt-free killers, or robotically servile but very capable workers.’ He sank half a shot of whisky in one gulp, and continued. ‘These experiments were a bunch of crap. They failed, dismally. And no surprise because, as a zoologist, I know the species barrier is just too big. In the end the Russians gave up their project. However, not everyone was so . . . gay, as you British say.’ Barnier smiled, in his bogus way. ‘The Chinese had been intrigued by the experiments from the start, Madame Mao visited that lab in Abkhazia, the Chinese even bought the data from the lab when it was nearly shut down in the 80s. So we know the Chinese liked the underlying concept –
a lot.
They just didn’t like the blundering clumsy Soviet method. Humanzees. Comedy science.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because of the mission. The mission to China and Cambodia. In ’76.’

Julia quietly said: ‘Please go on.’

‘As you know, in 1976 the Chinese government discreetly invited some selected western academics, historians, scientists, including me, to go to Beijing and Kampuchea for a series of “conferences”.’ Barnier did two drunken quote marks in the humid evening air, with his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘We were all known and committed Marxists, known sympathizers. But the Chinese conferences were a farce, at least for the zoologists like me. They showed us the Great Wall, they fed us plenty of abalone and pak choi, but they weren’t really interested in zoology, at least not after the first few days. I got the sense we were spare parts, some guys they had invited along just in case, and that pretty soon many other people: the neurologists, the anthropologists, the Ghislaine Quoinelles of our team, they were doing . . . the more
important
stuff, behind
closed doors.
The many many many closed doors of China.’

‘So that’s the answer,’ said Jake. ‘The zoology failed, and consequently they tried a second route.’

‘Yes, exactly.’ Barnier belched smoke. ‘The Chinese plan was this: they still wanted to create a man without conscience, without guilt, without our species shame, but they realized the zoological method was a pitiful dead end. The man apes stuff, that was nonsense. That’s why, in time, they ignored people like me.’

‘And they went for something more refined, something neurosurgical.’

Barnier’s eyes shone, a hint of mischief amidst the liquor and the terror.

‘You are getting it! But wait. To perfectly fit the puzzle together, we must use
all
the pieces you guys have provided. Let’s go back to France. We know from Prunieres, Ghislaine’s favourite obscure scientist, that there was a coincidence of trepanation and tribal violence in Lozère. How did this happen? Probably the first trepanations started as a rudimentary stone age cure for epilepsy. That theory has been around for a while. Call it letting the demons out if you like, as that’s maybe what cave men called it. But anyway, the reason these primitive surgeries endured is ’cause they actually freakeeeng
worked.
One of the most common forms of epilepsy is frontal lobe seizures, so called because they occur in the frontal cortex. So a crude trepanation can, remarkably, be effective after a fashion, if you hit the right spot. But here’s the genius bit!’

Barnier swallowed smoke as he continued. ‘The Chinese invited Ghislaine, the grandson of a great
gauchiste
scientist in Paris, once an expert on crossbreeding himself, to their conference. But they invited Ghislaine not just because of his political pedigree, but because of his theories. Ghislaine was the young and coming man, the radical, the
soixantehuitard
, the scholar who knew all about Prunieres, about trepanations and stone age violence,
and
he was the man who had developed these related theories – of human guilt, and neural evolution. And listening to all this, to Ghislaine’s ideas, the Chinese must have made the final deduction: that these primitive societies in France had achieved some un expected results from their archaic brain surgery, and therefore these ancient tribes had begun drilling in healthy brains. Deliberately.’

Jake shook his head.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like this. Imagine you trepan some caveman, because he has fits – epileptiform seizures – and you want to get rid of the demons. But when you do the surgery, it turns out, not only do you get rid of the demons, you turn him into a superior fighter, a warrior, a brutal fighter, a logical brute. Why? Because, quite by accident, you have chopped out some of the higher evolved structures of the frontal cortex, the neural networks
responsible for guilt and conscience
, the part of the brain that evolved in the Paleolithic, the Great Leap Forward, as Julia so brilliantly confirms.’

The traffic surged, a beggar stared, a ladyboy wiggled her tongue at Jake.

‘Ah. Jesus.’

‘Exactly. Fuckeeng
exactly.
So you discover that by drilling brains you can make real nasty ruthless
guilt free
killers. Like feral gorillas but smart. An inestimable evolutionary advantage
.
’ He vigorously extinguished his cigarette, and looked across the table. ‘So that’s why we see so many trepanations. All over the world. These stone age primitives began to do it in on purpose, to make themselves more warlike – but maybe these societies then
collapsed
because they killed too
well.
They collapsed into tribal violence, ritualized torture, executions, mass suicides even. And this is what we see in the Lozère, and the legends of the Black Khmer on the Plain of Jars. Violence and trepanation and tragedy. Hand in hand in hand.’

Julia interrupted.

‘But of course the crucial point is: the Chinese decided to repeat the stone age trepanations. To alter the neocortex.’

Barnier accepted his next whisky, slugged it, and lit yet another Krung Thep cigarette; then he said:

‘Yes. Using Ghislaine’s ideas and knowledge as a theoretical base, the same ideas you have unearthed, Julia, the Chinese must have established a way of chopping the possibility of conscience and guilt out of the neocortex. And then, when they finally felt ready, they must have started their grisly
experiments
on the brain, in Phnom Penh, on live subjects.’

Jake said:

‘But these experiments went wrong. Didn’t they? They turned people into zombies. Like Chemda’s grandmother.’

‘Indeed,’ said Barnier, ‘seems so. Looking back I can see why. If a guilt module exists it must be delicately interwoven with the frontal cortex
and
the limbic system, and the hippo-campus. You might get lucky and remove most of it, or you might just leave a drooling lobotomy victim. It’s not a question of just neatly spooning a few cubic cc’s of conscience from the top of your head. And their surgery was, I am guessing, desperately crude. This was Cambodia in the 70s. So they lobotomized these poor bastards and they turned them into alcoholics, rapists, psychotics. Not that the commies especially cared, they were feeling their way, these were early experiments. Broken eggs for the omelette.’ He smiled, and frowned, and gazed at a Muslim woman in a black shroud with a metal nose-mask over her face, like a Norman warrior. The Muslim quarter of Bangkok apparently began just north of the brothels and ladyboys.

Now Barnier continued: ‘My guess is that they must have cut into the wider inhibitory systems by mistake, dopamine reward systems, who knows. But they ended up creating retards or helpless monsters. Like that guy who tried to ravish Chemda, what was his name again?’

‘Ponlok. His name was Ponlok.’

‘So this explains it.’ Julia shook her head. ‘This also explains why people
volunteered
for the experiments.’

‘Uh-huh. Yes it does, does it not? The real committed Marxists volunteered, they wanted to be perfected, like Cathars, they wanted to be stain-free communists, to have their guilty bourgeois minds cleaned and purified.’ He spat smoke. ‘A quite magnificent dramatic irony, worthy of Flaubert. Given that it happened in maybe the most revolting regime in the world – because if anyone
should
feel guilt it is
the Khmer Rouge.’

Jake ignored his beer and asked:

‘So how did
you
end up
here
? What happened to
you
in the 70s?’

He sucked on his cigarette. ‘Like I told you. First they took us to China, and that was bad, dark, unsettling. And then we went to Kampuchea and that was just . . . Aii, that was just motherfucking
horrible
. As soon as we landed in Phnom Penh I could
smell
it! You could smell the desolation and fear. And there was the silence. Like a dead city, like Venice in a very bad dream. No cars. No laughter. No one talking. Just whispers. Whispers and heat and decay. And those eerie eerie streets, God those empty streets.’ Barnier slotted another drink, and ordered another drink. Jake said:

‘But what actually happened? What did you do there, in Cambodia?’

‘Same as China. Zero. I was ignored, because by then they knew they really wanted guys like Ghislaine, neurologists and historians and shrinks and the like. These important guys would be whisked away in jeeps, while I would stay in my creepy hotel, staring at the Tonle Sap, thinking about death. And one day I lost it, I just decided:
enough.
So I sneaked out of the hotel and I slipped my KR handler and I found a bicycle in one of those empty streets and I picked it up, and rode out into the countryside.’ He shook his head. ‘And I saw for myself. Out there, in the countryside. Ohmygod. I saw the truth Jake. I saw with my own eyes the fucking reality of their perfect Marxist revolution. Everyone was wearing black, black pyjamas, building these stupid irrigation canals, in the sun, carrying mud in baskets, barefoot. Sliding around in the mud. Skeletal.
I saw people pulling ploughs.
People. Not animals,
people.
’ He gazed, furious, at nothing. He continued. ‘They weren’t even robots, they were beasts, beasts of burden. Silent serfs. No one spoke. I cycled around and stared and listened and I heard nothing. Just people working in the mud. And it was then I realized: this place was a prison, just one big prison. An entire country turned into a concentration camp, a whole nation doing forced labour.
’
He coughed angry smoke. ‘That did it for me. I rode back, I was trembling all the way back. Almost sick in the street. Pretty soon I started asking questions and I got one or two people to talk and they told me about the killings, the many killings, people were being killed for anything, for wearing glasses, for planting their own potatoes, for speaking a foreign language, for loving their children too much, for writing, for talking, for dancing, for laughing – you really could get killed for laughing in Cambodia under the KR, you could get your head smashed against a tree for being happy,
beause laughter and happiness were capitalist
, and soon after I just
quit,
they let me go, all they did was tell me not to talk about the conferences, and I didn’t. Other people got more stringent restrictions: they were told to lie low for their whole careers, afterwards. So no one would guess what the communists were doing. Everyone had to conceal their discoveries and sacrifice themselves, to the greater project – revolutionary Marxism.’

Julia said:

‘And that’s why Ghislaine went back to the Lozère. And that’s why he reacted so weirdly, when I found the skulls.’

Marcel agreed, vehemently:

‘In his later years, he must’ve been fucking conflicted, like your friend Annika said. There he was, once a brilliant young scientist, with a brilliant new theory, based on the skulls and the bones of Lozère, the cave paintings, and Prunieres; and yet he was told to trash it, to forget it, to destroy his essays, to kill his own career. And then along you come and you find some more skulls, and he is reminded of all this, the waste of his life and his theories.’

‘He was told to do this, to stay silent,’ Jake asked, ‘because it’s what the Cambodians wanted?’

‘Ah no.’ Barnier shook his head. ‘No no no. Not the Cambodians, the Chinese, of course
. The Chinese were in charge
of the whole thing.
That’s what I always understood, this experiment was always a Chinese operation, they had the money and ambition and the idea, but they used the little Cambodians, their lunatic Maoist acolytes, the craziest regime in the world, as useful lieutenants. The Chinks were farming it out to the Khmer, outsourcing, franchising.’

‘Why?’ said Jake.

‘This was ’76. China was in turmoil. Mao was dying. The extreme Maoists needed somewhere to work
undisturbed
, Cambodia was their death laboratory, a fuckeeeng socialist
playpen
.’

A beggar with no legs dragged himself past Tony Roma’s pizza outlet. Jake asked: