Wild Things: Four Tales (9 page)

But I went into the Dark Game, and there I met Hoax. I heard him clearly. I understood how this brainwashing could serve the Dark Game – and how it could help me survive.

Getting into your brain isn't the problem with brainwashing. Anyone with a good mental crowbar can unlock that mush of gray matter.

It’s making your mind separate from your body so completely that your body becomes a servant to someone else’s mind. That is the goal of brainwashing. They are not cleansing the brain. They are turning it off, and switching on another brain, imprinting another set of memories and values and thoughts so that your past is no longer there. It is wiped out, but not so completely – you think you are the same person. But someone else has invaded you. The Other. The one who has turned off one switch has juiced you from another one.

And you are that person’s mind now. You are that person’s imagination.

That is what I learned. That is how I began to understand that the Dark Game was not just for one to go off on flights of fancy. To protect you from some pain of life. It could be changed, using this brainwashing. It could become a way to turn a switch in another – to implant your own mind into another’s mind, so that he no longer had his own perception but might, at least briefly, have yours.

I knew there was a way I could use this on Hoax. On the Axeman. I knew that there was a way I could put the Dark Game into them so that I might escape.

17

They told me later that I stood there for twenty hours.

They told me later that I had been realigned.

But I had not been.

The Dark Game had saved me. It had protected me. It had kept me from letting their words and thoughts press into my gray matter.

When they brought me out into the sunlight -- for the first time in many months – they rejoiced and called me Comrade and Friend and Healed One.

But, on the inside, I had already begun planning how I would destroy them and set their camp on fire, and sow the ashes with salt so that those demons might never rise again.

18

But I’ve got to pull you back to that night when I was eighteen. Remember? Me tied to the bed, the dead whore on the floor, and the real Harry Hoakes, my buddy, my pal, untying me, his breath all whiskey and perfume absorbed from his girl for the night.

“She thought she was going to be like Gene Tierney,” I said, and then, “Jesus, I’m going to end up in jail for this.”

“Or you’ll be in the jungle. In the goddamned war. Which do you want?”

“I choose the goddamned war.”

Harry grinned, slightly, despite everything. “You didn’t do it. You were tied up. I’m a witness to that.”

I got up and got dressed as fast as I could, tripping over my trousers as I yanked them up.

“You let her tie you up?”

I shot him a glance that shut him up.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We ain’t gonna get caught, that’s for damn sure,” I said.

Next thing I remember, we’re dragging that body out to Harry’s car, and we plop her in the trunk.

I looked at her once, in that fizzling little light of the trunk, before we shut it down on her.

Her face.

She was somewhere else.

That’s what Death is
, I thought.
It’s going into the Dark Game for good.

I had no feeling for her. She was no longer there.

But the drive out to the mesa, thirty miles away from Red Town, the whole way I kept wondering how she had been murdered, and why I had awoken from the Dark Game with the strange feeling of pleasure in my loins as if I had truly lost my virginity that night.

But it is a Mystery with a capital M.

Part of me has felt all these years that I had untied myself, had beaten her to death, and then had somehow wrapped myself up in the ropes again.

Houdini, after all.

We buried her in a desolate spot, so deep that the coyotes and scavengers wouldn’t be able to dig her up.

I heard, years later, that Red Town eventually flourished and became more than a saloon and whorehouse railroad stop. It expanded out into the mesa, and I think a shopping mall was built near the spot where we buried her.

Harry said to me, at four that morning, driving back to base, “No matter what happens, we can’t ever say we met her. Or were even there. The other girls won’t tell. They don’t like cops. But you and I have to be clear on this. We were never there.”

“Where?” I asked, and then Harry muttered, “Jesus,” and I knew our friendship was over that morning.

When I heard he died later, in the war, I felt bad for him. I missed him, too. We had done our time together, and that’s a bond even after it passes.

I wonder if he ever got over the sight that had greeted him when he stepped out of the ordinary world of red light night and into that motel room of me tied up and a dead woman on the floor.

But now, he’s in the Dark Game.

19

Suddenly, like an overnight celebrity, I became revered among the Enemy in the camp.

No longer made to sleep in the hole, I had a straw mattress beneath me, and I ate regular food with some of the lower officers. More of my own countrymen arrived at the camp. I saw them as they trooped in, proud and wounded, through the barbed wire at the edge of the jungle. The camp was in a flat wetland area, but with long planks connecting marshy islets, until you got to the end of the swampy part, and rose onto higher ground. The commander’s headquarters was at the highest point, and I got to calling it Mount Olympus. The pits and holes where the Americans were kept, I called Tartarus. I taught Hoax, who now accepted his nickname happily from me, about the various levels of Hell, and he and I cooked up a scheme to begin a new set of torments for my countrymen.

We would take
Dante’s Inferno
, which was easy enough to find, even with the supposed anti-European sentiment of the Enemy, and create elaborate Rings of Hell for the prisoners.

Next, I talked about the Cannibal Torture. I suggested a whole new way to do this. Why even use the Axeman, despite his pleasure in the act of cutting off flesh and bone from a live victim?

Why not me, their countryman? What would be more horrifying than a well-fed compatriot slicing off the lips of his fellow American in front of the remnants of a once-proud platoon? A USO show from Hell, I called it, and it took Hoax several days to see this as the less grandiose and more intriguing idea.
Dante’s Inferno
went on the back burner, as it were. Instead the USO Show from Hell would begin.

We’d have beautiful girls dancing for the boys. Then, we’d have the main event. I’d do a comedy routine, I told Hoax. I’d strip them of their dignity. I’d cut off bits and pieces of the happiest, sweetest guy they knew, the youngest of their friends, the one they thought of as a mascot.

Right before their eyes.

“They’ll tell you what you want to know,” I said. “They’ll divulge their mother and father’s addresses if you want, once we do this.”

Hoax, not suspicious in the least, was thrilled. Yet, he still didn’t completely trust me, for he felt the Axeman should be there to do the slicing. I wasn’t handed knives or razors. I was still a prisoner, albeit a Friend of the Enemy, as they proclaimed loudly, nightly, into the pits and holes of Tartarus.

20

The prisoners built the stadium, first.

I oversaw its construction, and they worked tirelessly and swiftly, for I told them that it was a monument to their Dead. That it was their Memorial, and that they must take pride in it. I spent some nights with them, talking of how we were going to be well-treated by our captors, and that they must trust me, despite appearances. They did not trust me at all, I could tell, but they had the resignation of those who wait for freedom to come from outside their sphere. The helicopters raiding from the sky, perhaps. The end of the war itself, perhaps. They had lost the will to escape. They had lost the will to resist. They were broken, yet capable men.

They did as I told them to do.

I also spent nights with them, playing the Dark Game.

I needed their minds. I need to bring them into a state of calm and of service.

I needed for them to hear only my voice.

21

The bleachers went up, the theater backdrop created. Within two weeks, it was, by the standards of the jungle, a beautiful imitation of an amphitheater, and could seat forty or fifty men.

The night of what I called The Most Magnificent Show in the Universe, finally arrived.

A banner announcing this, painted from human blood, hanging on the wall.

The celebrities of our Damnation were there: the Commander, with his long face and inscrutable gaze; my friend Hoax, a chubby, round-faced fellow who whispered in the Commander’s ear, no doubt about the show to come; the Enemy soldiers, dressed as if for an evening at the theater. No doubt the women with some of them were not wives, but girlfriends who lived in the nearby Enemy Town, just beyond our Doom City. The girls had fine red or blue dresses on, as if they would go to a celebration after the show. The men were dressed in full military garb. Cocktails were served, a rarity at this outpost, but the liquor had been distilled from a local flower, and had a jasmine-like scent. The air fairly crackled with the electric moment to come.

I felt as if we were going to stage a great Broadway show. Or a spectacular Fourth of July fireworks demonstration.

It would be, I was certain, the inauguration of some wonderful event that might be remembered and talked about for years to come.

The usual excitement of opening night spread, even among my countrymen. They were brought in, roped at the hands, shackled at the legs, shuffling to their seats, although I kept a contingent backstage, the actors in the drama to unfold.

Footlights consisted of small fatty candles laid in a semi-circle around the stage floor. The backdrop, an enormous canvas that had once been an officer’s tent covering but was now painted with scenes of the Enemy’s Great Leader, stepping on all things American.

Just seeing the backdrop made the Enemy guard cheer and raise their glasses.

What they didn’t know, of course, was that I had made sure that a bit of the opium water that I had grown to know well had been stirred into their drinks, and as I led them in their national anthem, as they stood and sang bravely and happily, they drank – all, including the girls – I could tell from their expressions that they had begun to go into a slight blurred state – the strong alcohol and the poppy had some effect.

The opium would help me with what I needed to do. First, I said, “We are here for a momentous occasion! This is the inauguration of a great moment of historical significance!

We are all the proud and the brave who have learned so much from our Enemy, who is really our Friend and who wishes to teach us the errors of our ways and the true path of life! Here, on this very stage, you will see the wonders of transformation!

You will see the magic of the ancients! The famous tricks of the fakirs of India! The secrets of the alchemists of old Europe! The mystical wonders of the sorcerers of ancient Mesopotamia!”

I spouted all the bull I could, and Hoax stood up and translated every word for the Enemy. They laughed, and brawled while some of my countrymen portray our President, and our Army foibles. They tripped, and simulated intercourse with each other, at my command, and the laughter from the stadium was enormous, even from Americans, whom I had brought into a state of the Dark Game just for this evening.

Hoax probably laughed the hardest, and once, when I glanced up at him, I saw the Enemy Commander slap him on the shoulder and whisper some approval in his ear that made Hoax beam.

The dancing girls came out next – they writhed and gyrated for the men. I had given them unhealthy doses of the local drink, and they began touching each other and taking off their clothes until they were nearly naked. This got the Enemy to cheer further, and the girls threw garments up to them.

My own countrymen sat quietly, as I had commanded for them to do in the Dark Game.

I could see that their eyes were glazed over, and they awaited my word.

Finally, I announced the evening’s entertainments. “Tonight, good gentlemen and ladies, for your pleasure, the Axeman and I will carve up several Americans before your eyes. They will devour one another, as that is the way of our kind, and you will see how corrupt in our very beings we truly are. But first, I ask for volunteers from among you. For I want you to participate greatly tonight. Do I have any takers?”

The Enemy ranks roared approval, and many leapt from their seats to volunteer. But I wanted a special man to come forward. I wanted an important man.

“Commander!” I called out.

“Yes!” cried my countrymen, “Commander!”

Hoax laughed, clapping his hands, turning to his leader. “Commander!” he said.

The Commander shook his head violently, laughing the entire time.

While he resisted coming forward, I brought the few remaining men from my own company out on the stage. They were further along in the Dark Game than the other prisoners.

Each was blindfolded, and they held each other’s hands. I had spent four nights with the three of them to make sure that their minds were switched into another realm, so that my voice and my mind was their only guide.

“Commander!” I cried out again, and even the Axeman, coming up beside me, raised his glinting blade as it caught the last of the sunlight and called the Commander by full name.

Finally, goaded, blurred from drink, the Commander came down from the bleachers.

I raised a hand and called out a word of cheer, and all the Americans began clapping for him, and soon the Enemy guard clapped as well, whistling, as the Commander went on stage.

“We have a magic show tonight!” I shouted to the noisy audience. “But we must have silence, now! Absolute silence!”

Within a minute or two, those in the bleachers quieted.

I glanced up at Hoax who smiled and nodded as if watching his prize protégé.

I thought of my friend Harry Hoakes, blown to bits by a land-mine. I thought of little Davy, tortured in front of me, tortured until his last breath left him.