On My Way to Paradise (68 page)

I remembered my compadres talking of General
Quintanilla as if her were some grand hero, and I was a fool who
knew nothing of history.

Something was wrong with me, terribly wrong. I’d left
more than my compassion behind when I left my home.

All I want is away!

"You fucking whore!" I shouted at Tamara. "I never
wanted to leave Panamá. Not once in my life had I ever wanted to
leave! What did you do to me? You put your wishes in my head! What
did you take from me?"

I glanced to my side. There was a pair of head phones
on the table next to me. I grabbed them and threw them at Tamara,
but at the last instant my arm spasmed and the shot went wide.

The very thought of hitting her filled me with
consuming guilt.

I reached for my machete, intent on stabbing her.

Yet I couldn’t kill her. In a thousand years I knew
that I would never be able to even consider harming her, no matter
how justified I might feel.

I hurled my machete down and began to tremble. My
breath came ragged and my teeth chattered, as they always do when
I’m ready to kill.

"I think that Tamara would like to talk to you
alone," Garzón said softly.

He studied me, kept between me and her for a moment,
guarding her.

Tamara’s wheelchair spun and she faced me. Her face
was slack, empty. Her microspeaker clattered, "Angelo won’t hurt
me. He could never do it. He can’t harm a woman." Her voice issuing
from the microspeaker sounded brutal, calculating. "Can you?"

I suddenly saw that she knew me better than I knew
myself. I’d quit fighting in the battle for Hotoke no Za not
because I’d hurt a person, but because I’d shot a woman. To kill
men in battle, even innocent men, had hardly fazed me.

I felt like a fool. I’d been so self-congratulatory
when I pretended that I had regained my compassion.

Tamara’s tone held a smirk as she informed Garzón,
"His mother told him never to hit a girl." There was no apology in
her eyes.

"That’s right! That’s right!" I shouted, recalling
all of the times my mother had said it, until the idea was
ingrained. I’d even shouted it as I slashed Lucío across the face.
"You did that to me?"

I cursed and wanted to strike her, but found myself
pacing back and forth like a mad dog in a cage.

Garzón watched us, confused, and I knew what confused
him: Tamara’s challenging tone, her boastfulness. This was not at
all like her.

He whispered to Tamara, "Very impressive! Impressive
conditioning!"

Then he ordered me, "Don’t harm her. She altered the
deep structures of your mind, erased patterns of thought built up
over a lifetime. She won’t be able to fix that, but she can give
you some of your true memories back. She’s been trying to recall
what she took from you for nearly two years.

"I’ll leave you now."

The general exited the room, leaving it empty but for
me and Tamara. His footsteps echoed loudly from the stone
ceiling.

I shrugged and stood there, furious. I waited for her
to speak.

Tamara regarded me distantly. I couldn’t fathom the
meaning behind her empty gaze.

"I did my best work on you," she said. "I never got
to make as many changes in the others—just minor reprogramming for
intelligence work. But I wasn’t at my best that afternoon. I never
was able to complete the job. I left some blank spaces in your
memory, and that should have warned you that something was
wrong.

"But you never caught on, did you?"

"I knew," I admitted. She sounded so sure of herself.
"I found blank spaces. I can’t remember anything about my father
except him weeping after my mother died."

"Fake," Tamara said. "I faked that dead-mother
thing." Tamara watched me. "Still, you ran according to my
program."

"What do you mean?"

Tamara watched me distantly. "You figure it out!" Her
eyes focused on the tray where a package of syringes sat next to
the vial of yellow liquid. "Give yourself point two milliliters of
that. I have some cutting to do. I’ve got to delete the old radical
program before I insert the new memories."

"You don’t need to cut out any more," I said,
suddenly wary. "What do you mean by ‘radical program’?"

Tamara explained, "It’s just a term. A program is a
set of memories we add to get you to act or behave differently than
you otherwise would. For example, I’ll program our assassin here to
tell his superiors that he killed you when he’d otherwise have to
report his failure. We call that a program. But a radical program
goes one step farther: we devise a program that leads to a specific
compulsive behavior—one learns to think in certain patterns, to
behave in certain ways based on past assumptions. A child who
learns to lie his way out of trouble quickly develops a tendency to
lie. Any time he’s faced with a dangerous situation he immediately
tries to lie his way out of trouble. After years this response can
become so ingrained it becomes the equivalent of a radical
program." She admitted softly. "I put such a program in you."

I felt terribly defensive. "What kind?"

She looked down to the holograph in the corner. An
image of a brain registered there, and worms of red fire wriggled
through it. "I call it a parietal-hypothalamic loop. When you view
any woman being harmed, you immediately associate it with the
torture and murder of your mother, along with similar incidents
that I programmed into your memory. This triggers an overwhelming
sense of horror, and you remember the plans for vengeance that you
never got to carry out. So you react with compulsive violence,
regardless of the danger to yourself. I laid this program down
hundreds of times across thousands of neuronal pathways. You’re
incapable of acting in a manner contrary to your programming."

I knew that she spoke the truth. I’d reacted with
violence to Abriara’s rape, and I’d seen Jafari’s attempt to
capture Abriara as a form of rape. So I reacted according to
programming, a marionette dancing on hits master’s strings.

Yet I could see no good reason to let her into my
mind again, to risk letting her rob me of even more. "Why should I
let you in?"

"Do you want to fly into a rage every time that you
hear about a woman getting harmed?" Tamara asked. "Look what it’s
already cost you. Inject yourself. Jack into the monitor." She
glanced toward a dream monitor on the table.

The situation was so bewildering that I couldn’t
think. I didn’t trust her fully, but she seemed sincere in her
desire to do this for my own good. If she had had evil designs, I
reasoned, she never would have needed to confide in me.

I filled the syringe, injected myself, and then
plugged the monitor into the jacks at the base of my skull.

I found myself in a cold desert where the wind swept
over barren sands and seagulls whirled in the air like
confetti.

The sky was gray. The scene made me tense. Tamara
appeared before me, gazing deep into my eyes like a goddess, as if
by merely peering into me with her black eyes she could fill my
mind with revelations.

I suddenly recalled General Quintanilla’s attempt to
overthrow Guatemala, my mother’s blood spattered in droplets behind
the china cabinet, my impotent rage, the rape of my sister Eva and
my despair.

Suddenly it seemed that all of these things had
happened only in dreams, vaguely disturbing dreams that were nearly
forgotten.

I’d never haunted the alleys at night with a gun in
my pocket searching for Quintanilla’s soldiers. I’d never suffered
that keen rage and despair. Dozens of similar memories came to mind
and dissipated in intensity in just the same way—a time in my youth
when I’d got in a fight in a bar with a man who had laughed as he
told of how he often beat his girlfriend, an incident where I’d
slapped a young boy in the feria for hitting his sister.

A great pain filled my head. I heard a noise like
strands of rubber snapping. I heard a great surging wind, and
suddenly I blanked out.

I roused slowly and stared around, unsure where I
was. A woman was sitting on a desert floor, staring up at seagulls.
I walked over to her and just gazed at her silently. She paid no
attention to me, and I wandered in circles till her name flashed in
my mind,
Tamara.
I ambled back, recalling where I was.

She looked up at me and asked, "Ready?"

"Yes," I said, not sure what I was confessing
readiness for.

A hundred memories came rushing into me.

I lived through’ them in dream time where a few
seconds felt like hours. Moments from fifty years of life spread
out before me, and I walked through them as if living for days.
Most were shadowy things—a smell, a touch, voices whispering in a
darkened room.

The mind doesn’t really store everything as some
claim; rather, our mind tricks us when we push it too hard, filling
in details from the imagination.

Rare were the memories that burst upon me in full
clarity so that I understood all of the implications.

The memories didn’t come in single episodes, engraved
in crisp detail. Rather, they were much in form like neurons within
the brain—a cell reaching out, touching a cell, which reaches out
to touches ten other cells. Each memory recalled ten other similar
bits of memory, till the whole was woven inextricably together to
form a story of a person or thing that had been important to my
life.

I remembered my mother in the years after I went to
Mexico to study morphogenic pharmacology. I knew now that my mother
hadn’t been raped and murdered. She’d lived pleasantly with my
father in a suburb for many years, and I recalled snatches of
conversations we’d held over the phone, a bright recollection of
nostalgic joy I’d felt once while visiting her for Christmas.

I recalled riding north on a maglev through a jungle
and seeing some young men by the tracks wrestling to pull an
enormous anaconda out to its full length. The smell of cigar smoke
was strong. I wondered as I lived the memory why this Christmas had
been important, and I recalled that my mother had been Catholic
most of her life, but when she was sixty-eight she’d suddenly
converted to Baptist.

She’d insisted on being re-baptized by immersion, and
had sent money so I could take the maglev up to Guatemala for the
ceremony.

My sister Eva had snubbed her on the occasion and my
mother was deeply hurt. I remember being on my mother’s back
terrace on a sunny day and seeing a stack of comic books by her
hammock: the comics were all Christian comics about bad people
going good, gangster kids in the ghettos finding
Jesus—Pablo
Little Frog Meets Christ, The Stiletto and the Bible.

My father sat with me, drinking coffee for breakfast
and laughing about my mother’s conversion. "She lies in her hammock
all day and reads those comics," my father had said, thinking it a
good joke.

"Noooo—" I countered.

"Sure!" my father said, waving his hand. "She even
sleeps with them out in that hammock all night, instead of sleeping
with me!"

I worried for her health if she slept out at night,
and remembered thinking that instead of growing old, my mother was
growing strange.

She began to phone me regularly, and at every call
she’d tell me of some evangelist who would be speaking in Colón in
the near future, urging me to go see them. Several times she broke
down and cried as she told me of how she feared for my spiritual
welfare. My mother died suddenly from an aneurysm two years later,
and my father blamed the sudden death on her habit of sleeping
out-of-doors.

Even though my wife and I had been separated for
seven years, we went to my mother’s funeral together, and thus the
memory of my mother recalled my time with Elena. The Elena in the
dreams looked nothing like the Elena of my memory.

She had no facial semblance to Tamara that I could
see, and I realized that Tamara had planted that memory so that I’d
feel bound to her.

Elena was plump and short with light brown hair, and
she wasn’t too bright. When I married her she seemed to have
strength of character, a drive about her, that made me love
her.

She would talk about her sex life as openly as she
would offer her opinion on a local politician, and I confused this
openness with basic honesty. I’d met her in college. Like me, she’d
spent part of her youth in a village in Guatemala, and she lacked
the social sense of one raised in the city. Our ineptitude at
handling social affairs made us cling to one other.

We married soon out of college, and she tried to
drive me toward earning a fortune. She got pregnant on our
honeymoon and, when we got home, she announced that I should go to
Miami and set up a practice and earn lots of money selling
rejuvenations for la nina. She felt convinced the child would be a
girl from the moment she learned she was pregnant.

My wife had often seen holos chronicling the wealth
and decadence of families in Miami, and in each show the wealthy
seemed to have a morphogenic pharmacologist on hand, someone to
make sure that their youth never faded. I found more decadence than
wealth in Miami.

Elena gave birth to a son, and when I returned to
Guatemala I saw Victoriano for the first time. The joy and sense of
mystery that washed over me upon seeing Victoriano ... . In that
moment, it was as if my son had been born to me.

Elena clung to me for seven years, and I soon decided
a lark to set up practice in Panamá, but always she nagged about
our dilapidated little home, the roaches under the sink, my general
lack of ambition.

I came home early from work in the feria one day and
began shaping the fern beds behind the house, digging at the roots
of the ferns so they wouldn’t grow into the lawn.

I sat in a chair in the shade and was drinking a beer
when a young Rodrigo sporting a beer belly rushed around the back
of the house shouting, "I think Elena is leaving you! She has
Victoriano and she’s taking everything!"