The Bangkok Asset: A novel (19 page)

M
emory, of course, is notorious for its power to deceive. Nevertheless, I am certain Ben and his brothers have faithfully reproduced the museum that I first visited in Saigon with my mother, Nong, all those years ago. Walking ramrod straight, and a little too fast, Ben takes me to what I suppose is his favorite exhibit: a photograph of a giant thousand-gallon tank of Agent Orange, which carries the legend
The Giant Purple People Eater.

“This is where we turned Nazi,” Ben announces loudly. He has become suddenly officious, a different person entirely; stress works all his features. His words pierce the somnambulant state I seem to have slipped into. “Did you know we had to refine napalm to make it better stick to human skin? It stuck especially well to the tender skin of young children.”

“No,” I hear myself saying, as if underwater. “No, I did not know that.”

A kind of panic overcomes him, like someone who suffers from claustrophobia. He marches us through the rest of the exhibits at a fast walking pace—the My Lai massacre; victims of Agent Orange; the picture I saw on my first visit with Nong all those years ago (exactly as I remembered: an athletic-looking GI, an M-16 in his left hand, his right holding the torso of an enemy fighter, which is hardly more than skin plus head hanging upside down; the GI is laughing hysterically).

Now Ben is glaring at me. I am put in mind of crazies who throw tantrums for no apparent reason: a sudden resurgence of uncontrollable rage waiting for a trigger.

“You gotta blow them away, you have no choice. You can’t be who you are and let them be who they are. It don’t work. Someone has to die.” He raises his voice again, making it crack. “We coulda won, you know?”

“Won what, the genocide?”

He blinks rapidly. “Yeah. The genocide. Why not? It’s only the first time you kill that you feel bad.” He stamps his foot. “So, why didn’t we just drop the Bomb on Hanoi?” He stares at me, distraught. “I could have been standing here a winner, instead of a loser.”

I am afraid of him, this crazy old man, so I say nothing. The suffering of a crazy possesses an unnerving authenticity that can make you feel like a fraud in your fragile sanity. Is it because we know deep down that a divided mind is perhaps the only honest reaction to a cleft world? Sorry, R, these are jungle thoughts, I’ll be okay once I’m out of here.

Or will I? There’s an atmosphere of finality in the camp that creeps up on you, as if this were the hidden endgame I have been postponing all these years.

A groan starts somewhere deep in Ben’s chest, and ends with a scream. “You trying to fuck with my head, boy? You trying to fuck me up all over again? We weren’t supposed to lose.” Now he weeps. “We could have had a victory parade just like after World War Two. The whole of New York would have turned out to honor us.”

Now I cannot stand any more. I am pulling him toward the exit by grabbing the strap of his dungarees. He forces a halt in front of the “Napalm Girl,” who is running naked toward the camera, her body burning with the chemical that has stuck to her. Ben bursts into tears. Now
he
is running toward the exit. I race after him, but when I pull open the door of the hut, there is no sign of him.

I have to go back in. I stop in front of a photograph of an eighty-five-year-old woman in a wheelchair leading ten thousand people in a march from Berkeley to Oakland on November 25, 1965; she carries a banner with the legend
My Son Died in Vain, Don’t Go to War, Go to Prison.
Black-and-white pix of marches and demonstrations from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, France, Britain, the USSR. Now I see close-ups of Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn, two helicopter pilots raised to the level of superheroes: they saved the lives of ten Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. In November 1965, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison, and Alice Herz soaked themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire outside U.S. government buildings. Here is the wall of the intellectuals, led by Bertrand Russell of the U.K., giving finely articulated reasons why the war must end. A telegram sent by Ho Chi Minh to “American Friends” on the occasion of 1968 New Year’s. Finally, a distraught young woman, on her knees, weeps over the dead body of a fellow student at Kent State University.

The one that grabs me the most, though, is a highly colored, deliberately amateurish poster by vets who opposed the war:
Don’t go, the U.S. Government will turn you into a psychopath.

Outside the hut it has started to rain with the sudden violence of the tropics. I stand in the downpour and shiver. Now a tall, wild figure, also without protection from the rain, appears from behind one of the other huts, cupping a lighted cigarette.

“Ben flipped, didn’t he? Captain America took over, I suppose? You must forgive him—and forgive me, too,” he says. “I hope you understand why we had to do that?” He gives a good strong pull on the Camel.

“What is a wormhole?”

“I’ll tell you in the truck on the way back. The point was that you should see where everyone is coming from.”

“Everyone?”

He looks at me. “Yes. The Asset included.”

I
follow Bride down a narrow path through the jungle opposite the main entrance. We stop on the edge of a clearing where crops have been grown in the past, but not recently: another long hut on blocks, but without windows and with locks more serious than those on the other huts. The Doctor points at it: “That was my lab, for four decades.” He shakes his head. “Four decades. The first ten years are about adaptation, organization, hierarchy, the sophistication of food gathering and preparation and water retrieval. After that people need something beyond mere survival. And that’s normal people who haven’t been severely damaged. In the Middle Ages in Europe nearly half the year was taken up with religious holidays, which often degenerated into orgies. We needed a structure, d’you see? But what? There were no examples we could use from modern times. Or even medieval times. Or even ancient Roman times.” As he ticks off the millennia he studies my face, searching for the light of understanding and finding none.

“One had to reach right back to the very wellsprings of the human psyche.”

“Eleusis?” I ask.

He gives a tolerant smile. “A good guess and, I confess, the thought crossed my mind. But you have to remember ancient Greece was an upstart civilization patched together with half-understood philosophies stolen from Egypt and Persia. Greece was the New World of the time, the older cultures laughed with contempt at the superficiality of clowns like Plato.”

He leads me from the hut to a footpath, where we surprise Amos of the big hair. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as we emerged. He was standing behind a tree. The tree was too thin for his hair, though. Now he comes out, smiling, as if trying to pretend he wasn’t spying. Dr. Bride grins.

“See what I mean about espionage?” He jerks a chin at the black man. “Amos is an artist. He’s excited that you’re about to witness his masterpieces—and he’s also shy. Is that not so, Amos, my dear friend?”

“Once a shrink always a shrink,” Amos says, shaking his head.

He leads away from the camp, along a well-worn path that brings us to some karst formations that perhaps once amounted to small limestone hills, but have been eroded so that the mineral outcrops are no higher than the trees. The karst, though, has produced a cave system with an entrance at ground level behind a Bodhi tree. We pause for a moment.

“Caves are where we started. We must put ourselves in the bodies of our most distant ancestors. Imagine a brain just as efficient as our own, probably more so since it had to be more alert to survive. Now consider how this brain developed expertise in cave management and technology over more than fifty thousand years. According to some, as long as two hundred thousand—that’s a hundred and ninety-six thousand years before recorded history. What were we doing all that time, with those marvelous big brains of ours?” Bride stares at me, waiting for a response.

“I guess we got pretty good on caves.”

“They’re in our DNA. If we’re honest and relaxed, merely entering a cave does something to our heads. I’m not talking mysticism, just the basic law of programming. There’s no way caves don’t evoke something from deep within. Right, Amos?”

Amos nods and moves his gaze from Bride to the mouth of the cave, then back to me. “He’s right. It really started with the cave.”

“But before the rituals could be established, there was work to be done. Hard work.”

“Had to shovel shit for six months before we reached the end,” Amos said.

The black man shares a glance with the Doc, who nods. Amos leads us into the shadows. Once we cross a certain line, though, I see there is illumination.

The cave is so deep we cannot see to the end. Indeed, it gives the impression of infinity because there are oil lamps set at about ten yards apart that form a double line like the lights on a landing strip; the lamps seem to continue, endlessly, into the bowels of the earth. My mind flicks through available references and produces a memory of the caves of Cu Chi, dug mostly by women.

“Did the women also work here? You said some of the casualties of MKUltra were female?”

A strange look comes over Bride’s face. “Yes,” he says gently, as if he feels sorry for me. “But not much. You see, most of them fell pregnant within the first year. They were keen to work, they were good American stock with the Puritan ethic still operating, somehow, but we couldn’t allow them to risk the babies, could we?”

While I look at him I am aware of my lips forming words, then discarding the words, because no sound comes.
Are you ready for this?
his expression asks.
No, I’m not ready for this,
I signal back. Something in me carefully covers up the reference to the women and their babies.

When Amos hands me an oil lamp so I can explore for myself, I discover paintings. I think of the cave paintings at Lascaux, which had so impressed one of my mother’s French clients that he insisted on taking us there. These paintings are fresh, though, and do not depict animals. They are more in the tradition of urban graffiti, with stylized fighter planes, begging Southeast Asian kids, barrels labeled
Napalm
and
Agent Orange,
even a street of brothels that could be Soi Cowboy.

Amos leads us a dozen or so paces forward before we are joined by someone who emerges out of the shadows. It is Ben, the Special Forces vet who showed me around the museum. I guess he must have slipped over here after he ran out of the museum. He exchanges a few words with Amos in that language I do not understand. Bride joins in the conversation, speaking the strange dialect in that plummy accent of his. Now we continue.

One by one the other vets emerge from the shadows to greet us. After a few minutes, they have all arrived: Ben, Casey, Herman, Jason, Jerry, Frank, Mario. There is a feeling of a religious procession as we move in a group slowly down into the earth. The cave narrows after about a hundred yards and seems to be tapering before it ends altogether. The frescoes have changed their character; instead of recognizable objects from the modern world, they have become more abstract: serpentine coils twist in and out of each other in ayahuasque patterns. Deeper still, and the snakes grow wings.

I am wrong about the cave coming to an end. It narrows to less than the width of a door in a house, so that we have to turn and squeeze past, but it immediately widens again into a spherical space with a ceiling so high it remains invisible. This is the end of the journey into the center of the earth. A sheer wall of limestone faces us across a space in which a single naked male human body lies on a slab. I’m fighting the need to vomit and staring at the Doc, speechless.

“Mat Hawkins,” Amos says. “He died two days ago.” He turns to let Bride speak.

“As I said,” Bride continues, “I had to go back to basics.” He coughs. “We all did it, of course. I mean
Homo sapiens.
Cannibalism is our primary loss of innocence and at the same time our primary sacrifice and the food supplement that saved us from annihilation in times of famine. Not one early society of humans did not practice it, especially when in pioneer and pilgrim mode. Without it there would be no human race. Naturally, if one is to rebuild the psyche from scratch, one has to return to that moment.”

“Naturally.” I stare at the part-eaten cadaver. “You only ate bits of him?”

“The purpose is sacred and ritualistic—that’s how you purge necessary sin, d’you see? Like eating the body of Christ—a relatively modern and ersatz imitation of the real thing such as we have here. We ingest the dead flesh, give it life again in our own bodies.”

Bride is using a quite different personality as vehicle to convey his mood. He is beyond solemn; it is as if the gargoyle I saw in the van had found its voice.

“Right,” I say, “right,” unable to take my eyes off the long wounds where someone has carved steaks out of Mat Hawkins’s thighs.

Amos has come closer to me and seems to represent the group, who is staring hard at me.
Does he get it or not,
their eyes demand to know.

Now my mind slips back again to the women and their kids.
Were the children brought up here, to this?
Something in me doesn’t want to know the answer. I close my mouth.

Bride speaks in a slow priestly tone. “You could say it was a kind of sorcery, one might as well use that word. As the great Carl Jung pointed out, the material world might yield to reason, but the human psyche does not. We are hardwired by the laws of magic, which we desecrate with every logical thought we entertain. Hence the agony of modern man. It was reason got us into this mess, reason that sent half a million to serve as psychopaths over here in Southeast Asia. What could have been more reasonable:
We are right, they are wrong, the President is facing an election, our people love war and it makes us rich, so let’s kill them all the way we did the Indians.
Only a return to the most basic, magical, reverential springs of human consciousness could heal my damaged band of brothers.”

“Radical,” I say, trying hard not to sound like a reason-crazed modern. “Radical.”

“Yes,” Bride agrees. “Quite right.”

He is still waiting for something to click in my brain. I am still bewildered. What more could there possibly be?

Bride coughs, I think to hide his frustration with me. “It was always a ritual carried out with the utmost respect, a consecration and a sacrament, a literal sharing of our brothers who having given their lives to the community ended by sharing their flesh—the ultimate in selflessness, you might say. The very opposite of narcissism.” I nod. “And to a large extent, it worked—did it not?” The question is addressed to the group.

“Sure did,” Amos says. “We might not look like humanity’s finest, but we’re sure as hell a lot more straightened out now. If it weren’t for all those man steaks, I don’t think we’d all be able to walk and talk at the same time.” A chorus of agreement from the old men. And still the message conveyed by stares and tightening of the lips tells me that I’m just not getting it.

“That’s always the final question, then as now. Does the magic work or not?” Bride is insisting, coming closer to me and towering above me in his need for me to understand. “Even the most reasonable men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency would agree with that. After all, they are in the business of being effective:
whatever works
has always been their secret motto.”

“Goldman,” I say.

“Correct.” Everyone seems to sigh with relief. For some reason I had to be the first to utter that name.

“Goldman—he followed what you were doing. He got it. But he had no scruples?”

“Keep going,” Bride says.

“The children.”
I’ve finally said it, but feel no catharsis, no relief. Neither does Bride or his men. Now that I’ve burst the balloon they look at the floor in shame.

“We had no facilities to bring up kids,” Amos says, his voice sad and angry. “How could we? We were cavemen struggling for survival. You need first-class hygiene for a newborn infant. You need drugs. Not every mother can breast-feed. In conditions like this, in ancient times, only a small percentage of kids survived the first three years.”

“We didn’t want to see the children get sick and die. That wasn’t going to help the therapy,” Bride says. “We’d silenced enough villages where children once played.”

“Goldman took them,” I snap. Amos turns away and Ben begins to whimper. Even the Doc cannot look me in the eye. “You were like a Nazi stud farm, breeding humans for war purposes. How else was the CIA to get its zombies, now the program was in deep cover?” I blow out my cheeks; I am red-faced as the revelation sinks further in. “I think he encouraged you. I think he wanted you all to screw yourselves silly. What a gift for his program: babies no one knows about, with no social identity, invisible kids growing up in a totally controlled environment.
Militarily
controlled, with guidance from military shrinks.”

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.