The Bangkok Asset: A novel (18 page)

He pauses and rubs his chin. “But there was a parallel narrative. The CIA maintained a low profile because they were the ones who inadvertently caused the acid craze to spread by experimenting with it on human guinea pigs, most of them military personnel and not always volunteers. The public got the truth in tiny drops that precluded scandal, and all was going well until the news of the murder by the CIA of Dr. Frank Olson, more than twenty years after the event, hit the fans. Olson was a bacteriologist and CIA officer involved in the Company’s LSD experiments. Hell broke loose.”

He smiles. “You see, I was famous professionally, because of dozens of papers I had written on the subject of LSD. Famous, too, in the subculture, for singing its praises. They needed me even more than they hated me.” He frowns, takes out another Camel, and lights up. “I think it was my long hair they most resented. Their in-house shrinks were all gray men in suits with crew cuts. I was psychedelic, big time.”

“Why did they need you so much?”

“Collateral damage.” He taps his head. “Right here. And we’re talking thousands of souls. Uncle Sam doesn’t screw up by halves.” He sighs. “It really is a miracle drug. D’you see, it acts like an electron microscope—and that’s the problem. The teeniest, weeniest neurosis is magnified ten thousand times—and that’s merely with recreational use in favorable circumstances among friends. Imagine how it might affect one—” He stops to stare at me, as if unsure of the wisdom of continuing.

“What?”

“If some bastard is butchering a child in front of you, for example, as part of the experiment? Or ordering you to do so?”

I stare at him. Blood has drained from my face. I feel gray.

He remains quiet, giving me space. When he thinks I’ve recovered, he continues. “All their own shrinks wanted out pronto. The thing had gone horribly—and I mean
horribly
—wrong. The reputations of upward of a hundred psychiatrists was on the line. Not to mention the Company itself. I was an ideal scapegoat, a grinning clown with a doctorate in hallucinogens. Confident, too. Stupid, I suppose. But not so stupid that I didn’t realize how much they needed me. This was my moment. As it turned out, my nationality worked in my favor. They could blame everything on an alien—as usual.”

He looks at me as he coolly takes a toke. “I told them I needed a very big space where no one could find us. They said, ‘Not U.S. territory.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ They said, ‘How about Cambodia, we’ll buy a chunk through a shell company. We’ll do a secret protocol with the government so they leave you alone.’ Usual thing. I said, ‘Okay, but I need money.’ They said, ‘Money is no problem.’ I said, ‘I mean funding for the next twenty years. You don’t fix heads the way you fix broken legs.’ They said, ‘Funding for the next twenty, okay.’ They weren’t so sharp when it came to bargaining. They’d let me see how desperate they were, so I said, ‘No, funding for the next forty.’ They said, ‘Look, just make the problem go away. Whatever you need, you’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Seclusion. Absolute seclusion. Most of these guys and gals are never going back to the world. They need a special space to live and die in.’ That made them very happy. They even smiled. ‘How about dense jungle, twenty acres, only one way in and out, land mines all around?’ They were particularly generous with land mines. I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘We’ll send in the engineers to do the earthworks for you. Army huts good enough?’ I said, ‘Water? Electricity?’ They said, ‘No problem. As many army generators as you need. Wells as deep as you need. Pumps and pipes.’ I said, ‘Fuel?’ They said, ‘We’ll bury linked ten-thousand-gallon tanks for diesel, you’ll be self-sufficient for decades.’ I said, ‘Food? Cooking?’ They said, ‘Your problem. No normal person is allowed in. It’s you and the crazies. Grow what you need.’ ”

Bride draws another long toke on the Camel. “Of course, I saw what they were up to. They thought I’d never last more than a few years, but that was enough to pass the buck. They’d find a way of saying it was all the fault of this crazy Brit shrink: ‘Only have to look at him to see how mad he is. Don’t know how he got away with it for so long, trying to build some kind of LSD utopia in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.’ ” He smiles. “Actually, they were quite right. The man I was then would never have lasted. I had to become someone else, didn’t I? I had to go further with the LSD initiation. Further than anyone ever went. Much further than Leary would have dreamed possible.” He gives a wan smile. “Poor Timothy—I knew him well—so much talent, but he fell prey to the vice of evangelism.” He closes his eyes for a moment and allows a sardonic smile to bloom. “I’m talking about the early negotiations. Once we were settled they found reasons to take a deeper interest in us. But we’ll save that story for later if you don’t mind.”

Now he gazes over the river: mostly wet-look black with some reflection of city lights. “Most of them died, of course. Beautiful boys and some girls too—the women who had volunteered at Langley. Heads all fucked up. Know that poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg?
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’
? It was worse than that by a thousandfold. Make that a million.” He is quiet for a long moment. “Suicide usually. I knew it would happen. What you will see tomorrow are the survivors. The best of the bunch. The toughest, anyway. The remnants.”

I am put in mind of a weekend seminar where the first evening is spent on introduction of the topic, prior to more serious learning the next day. After a few more minutes it becomes clear the Doctor has delivered his welcoming talk and now descends to entertaining anecdotes about life in Southeast Asia over the past forty years, how much has changed and how much has not. It seems he survived Pol Pot’s brutal regime, but he does not explain how. He is a gifted raconteur, though, and keeps me fascinated until it is time to go to bed.

I
’m still at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Doc Bride called just now to say he has checked out already and is downstairs with a car and driver. He is impatient because the journey into the bush is long and slow at the other end and he wants to arrive at our destination by early afternoon. I’m throwing my toothbrush and shaving gear into my overnight bag, checking my money belt for passport and cash, dashing down to reception, paying in baht at a ruinous exchange rate, humping my bag out to the white Toyota four-by-four with a Khmer driver that is waiting at the curb. The Doctor and I sit in the middle seats, but at opposite windows. He issues an instruction to the driver in Khmer without saying hello to me.

Phnom Penh is a small town and it takes only a few minutes to reach the suburbs, which quickly degenerate into shantytowns with dirt roads between shacks with tin roofs. Quite often there are homemade elevated walkways to enable people to keep out of the mud during the rainy season. Kids have fun in tin cities like this; I catch sight of big, round, mischievous faces, small gangs with monkeylike mastery of the maze in which they live. On the other side of the glass it is already hot, of course, but not yet unbearable. I know these slums will be asleep before noon and stay that way until sunset. I have a feeling that where we are going may not have great satellite cover, so I make my early-morning call to Chanya.

“Hello, darling,” I say.

She grunts sleepily. “Where are you?”

“Phnom Penh, we’re in a van on our way to the jungle.”

“We?”

“I’m with Dr. Christmas Bride.”

I thought the name would amuse her, as it did the first time, but she merely grunts again.

“You okay?” I say.

“Yes. Except that I’m suffering from event starvation, Action Man.”

“See you in a day or so. There might not be any satellite cover where we’re going.”

“Take care,” she says.

I turn to look out of the window: scrappy bits of land, some huts, a brand-new part of a highway that says
foreign investment
all over it, some brush and paddy fields, a boy following a buffalo with a switch. I try to work out where this Englishman is coming from. In repose, when he is not making full use of his mobile features, there is much of the gargoyle in the way he stares malevolently into space.

At about noon the driver turns off the road, which is now bare concrete, onto the shoulder, which is an outreach of jungle remains. There are no tall growths and the scrubby bush looks unhealthy and primitive, as if something has poisoned such advanced life as trees and flowers, leaving only primeval vegetation that hugs the ground and crawls like something cowed and persecuted. I know that we have been traveling steadily east since we left the suburbs of Phnom Penh and that it was in the east that Nixon dumped his thousands of tons of bombs in a secret operation that was supposed to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but succeeded only in destroying Cambodia. I suppose we cannot be in that area yet; even so, the suspicion adds a kind of poison to the moment. When the driver opens the back I see a wicker basket piled up with sandwiches and two bottles of wine. The driver finds a collapsible table and even a tablecloth, wineglasses. The Doc and I sit opposite each other on folding chairs.

The sandwiches are well made, with enough of the juice from the tomatoes softening the white of the bread without compromising the
craquant
of the crust; the cheese, a buffalo mozzarella, makes, with the olive oil—and the hint of basil— a delicious soft multitone motif in the mouth, and the authority of the ham completes the symphony. The wine adds the frisson of narcotic essential for a complete culinary experience. This is all thanks to French influence in Cambodia. We eat in silence.

A couple of hours later the road turns into a mud track, then stops at a wall of jungle. Now we are staring at those huge exotic Asian hardwoods of the same kind that embrace giant stone Buddhas at Angkor. The only gap in the overwhelming vegetation is filled by a truck with a wheelbase at least five feet off the ground, with giant tires. Without a word Doc Bride gets out of the van and gestures for me to follow him to the truck, leaving the Khmer driver to turn around and go home.

We approach the truck from behind and it is from the passenger side that I first catch a glimpse of the man in the driver’s seat, a silhouette that reveals a mop of negroid hair so huge it is like an exotic bush. I would have expected it to belong to a lithe young fellow from the ’burbs, circa 1968, except that it is gray. When he turns around to acknowledge me, I see he is in his early seventies. Bride climbs in before me and the three of us share the bench seat.

“This is Amos,” Bride says. Amos and I exchange greetings. “Tell him about your hair, Amos. He needs to start to understand.”

“The development of a young person is very delicate,” Amos says. “Interrupt it violently with a powerful mind drug, and that young person will return to certain events again and again throughout their life. Some part of them will fixate for the duration. I was a good black boy in the sixties, never grew my hair long, did drugs, or got into trouble. My dad was obsessed with keeping my hair short, those hippie blacks disgusted him, like they were betraying their Negro Christian identity. But I wanted to grow my hair long. Then I volunteered for MKUltra.” He gives a huge, heaving sigh with a glance at Bride. “Don’t make no difference knowing what the problem is. The passengers on the
Titanic
knew the problem was a huge rip in the hull, but they still drowned. That’s why the great religion of psychology failed utterly.” He gives me a quick look, turning his vast gray bush to do so, then says, “Right, Doc?”

“Amen,” Bride says.

“I can’t do nothin’ about this obsession.” He turns again to stare at me intensely for a moment as if his personal history has absolved him from normal social restraints. Dr. Bride waits patiently while Amos loses himself in some kind of inner speculation that continues for about five minutes and involves gazing at me in clinical fascination. Only then does he start the truck and we move off.

Once we’re on our way I see why we need a truck like this. Huge ruts in the track from the wet season would destroy any other kind of vehicle. And the jungle is so dense, you’d probably need a gallon of napalm for each square foot to clear it. Progress is slow, therefore, and nobody speaks for an hour or so. Little by little the mood of both my companions changes. Mine changes, too, but in the opposite direction. They relax somewhat and Amos shares his chore by saying things like,
Damn close, wow that weren’t here last year.
Doc Bride grunts back in a friendly tone. I, on the other hand, feel the oppression of the jungle just as if I were bouncing around on the bottom of a green ocean on an alien planet with extraterrestrials as companions.

F
inally the truck stops at the end of the track. An iron arc forms a vault over an entrance and carries the legend:

I
AM
IS THE PRISON THAT MAKES YOU FREE

I look at the Doc, who looks embarrassed.
“ ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ ”
he quotes.

“What does it mean?”

“Don’t remember.”

Amos jumps out to open two heavy iron gates while we wait with the engine running. “The gates used to open automatically, but that was before the last generator packed up,” Bride explains. “Somehow the natural evolution of our community caused us to give up on fixing things.” He points to a water tower on iron scaffolding. “We used to have an electric pump, now they use the emergency hand pump that’s been repaired a dozen times. A lot of work, but it’s something to do.”

Once inside the compound I see there are no walls or fences other than the impenetrable jungle. The three of us jump out and the Doc helps Amos close the gates behind us. Now that we have entered the camp this wizened old man takes center stage like a king who has returned to his castle.

We are inside a large flat space comprising a closed village of long single-story wood huts on concrete pillars to keep them off the jungle floor. Many have been joined together longitudinally to make a kind of railway carriage fifty yards long or more. Streets are formed between them with overhead awnings to protect from rain and sun, and there are elevated boardwalks to keep people above the mud during the wet season. The compound suffers from a sense of neglect and decay; jungle grass has sprouted around most of the huts, gravel pathways are overrun with weeds. Only a few of the huts have the appearance of habitations; the others are run-down to the point of collapse. One near the jungle wall has succumbed to creepers and the roof has caved in the grip of a vegetable boa constrictor. There doesn’t seem to be any people around.

“They’ll arrive one by one,” Bride whispers, scanning the compound. I am put in mind of a nature documentary where the wildlife expert whispers into the camera with religious reverence. “They’ve seen
you,
that’s what’s holding them back. It’s not fear, exactly.”

“What, then?”

“Shyness. Very few strangers come here, we lost the knack of talking to outsiders pretty soon after we started. Naturally, now I live in Saigon I’ve retrieved my social body.” He checks my face to see how I react to the phrase
social body,
which is a Buddhist concept, used mostly by Tibetans. “Also”—he scratches his face—“we’re all conscious of being weird. You can be sure they’re watching you. They won’t come out until they’re sure you’re okay.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Nothing. They’ll read you from a distance.”

“You lived here full-time?”

“Certainly. There was no other way. It was the valley of the blind and I owned one good eye.”

I shiver: here live souls who were inches away from total destruction by the ones they most trusted. Aggravated rape of the mind. No one has ever been punished.

Now I notice there is an empty circle in the middle of the compound, the interior of which has been carefully cleaned and scraped and covered with gravel. The Doc indicates with his chin that I should stand there while he and Amos go off behind one of the huts.

After about five minutes a man in denim dungarees appears: a few wisps of white hair that must once have been blond, broken veins in a sensitive north European skin, a posture of deep humility bordering on meekness, a straggly white beard. I would put him in his mid- to late sixties. He looks deeply at me but says nothing. He continues to stare at me from watery blue eyes without speaking while, one by one, other inmates appear from different directions. They emerge from behind the cabins, or perhaps out of them, it’s impossible to say.

There are seven of them, not including Amos or the Doc. In each case they walk slowly, warily, but at the same time with a sense of propriety: this is their space. They are all between the ages of sixty and seventy, dressed similarly in denims, with jungle attitude. Those with hair have grown it long and tied it in a ponytail. Most have not shaved for decades and have acquired long, unkempt spade beards not dissimilar to those of holy men of the Himalayas, but to me they most resemble rednecks from remote hamlets somewhere in Alabama. They stare and wait about ten yards away from me without speaking or moving. Behind them I see the Doc and Amos watching from some distance, leaning against a hut. Now one of them steps forward and starts to sniff me. He steps back after quite a few inhalations in which he seems to be examining my odor. Now another steps forward and does the same thing. One by one they all have a good sniff, then retire to the edge of the circle: I guess identity is established by odor here in the jungle. When I check their faces I see in each the same tormented speculation on some problem of inner space.

There are no words exchanged at all between this close-knit community, but a decision seems to have been collectively taken when the first old man steps forward. He looks into my eyes. Without offering a hand he says, “I’m Ben.”

“I’m Sonchai,” I reply, squinting at them in disbelief. Now they take a single step forward, one by one.

“Casey.”

“Herman.”

“Jason.”

“Jerry.”

“Frank.”

“Mario.”

Ben starts to speak in the wavering voice of someone who rarely uses words at all and seems to be delivering a set speech in a language half forgotten.

“I had a vision. She was a combination of Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe. Doesn’t matter if you think of her as Marilyn Loren, or Sophia Monroe, doesn’t matter at all. That’s the way with wormholes.
It doesn’t matter, see?
My vision encompassed the beauty of both those women, and all the other good women in the world, it was just a perfect, glowing female love, two kinds of woman in one body, and Marilyn Loren was standing at the top of an iron staircase, a kind of platform at the top of the staircase, and I climbed up to it, driven by pure love I climbed up to it, to that platform where she was waiting, then I realized I’d made a slight mistake, she was actually on another platform, a little higher up, but when I got to the next platform I saw I’d made the same mistake, and so on. Over and over. And this obsessed me. Long after they’d done screwing with my head it obsessed me, this pure love that had come to me while they were training me to kill people. But without Marilyn Loren, life had no meaning for me—none at all. She was the only thing left in my head that I had put there myself. It took the Doc to explain that I’d gotten stuck in infinity. In his system infinity is a thing you can get stuck in. Just as your body can get stuck in a doorway, so your mind gets stuck by—” He stops himself, begins again. “It turned out that Marilyn Loren was my wormhole. That was the living agony at the center of the corpse.”

He steps back to the edge of the circle to let a brother step forward.

“Hi, I’m Casey.” His hair is tied back with a piece of string and his Amish beard extends to the center of his chest. “I loved dogs, so they made me kill one, slowly, when I was on acid,” he says, tears streaming down his face and wetting his beard. “That’s how they got me. Dogs were my wormhole. I killed lots of people, too, but only after they made me kill the dog.”

Another steps forward. “Hello, I’m Jason. Want to know why I stayed in the body? I saw this was not life, but death. This sojourn in the body is death. So why be in a hurry to die? We’ll all soon be free anyway. But I can’t stand to be with people who don’t know they’re dead. It fucks my head up so bad, I have to run away. Do you know you’re dead? I can’t tell. You kind of look like you do and you look like you don’t, both at the same time.”

One by one they step forward to deliver their harrowing stories, then stand back. Now it is my turn to speak.

“I’m just a beginner here,” I say, almost paralyzed by the sense of weirdness. “I’ve come to learn. I would like to know more.”

This gambit has a strange effect on the group. They stare and stare at me as if I’m crazy and they scratch their heads. Finally, Ben says, “Really?”

“Yes,” I say. “Really.”

Small talk has no place here. It seems I’ve said something with serious implications that I cannot myself unravel. They frown and study me. When discomfort makes me walk around the circle holding my chin, trying to come to terms with the weirdness of the camp, they follow me with their eyes and hold their chins, as if I am a stage act. As if I have an answer. I finally exclaim, “Will you stop staring at me, please?”

Instantly they drop their eyes, as if ashamed of themselves. “We’re sorry,” Ben says. “See, for us you’re something very special.”

“Yep,” another agrees. “Very special.”

General murmurs of agreement.

“Would you mind telling me why?”

“ ’Cause you said you wanted to learn. Nobody else ever said that to us. Anyone who visited didn’t want to know scat—they just wanted to get the hell out.”

At this they all nod their heads gravely.

“What is a wormhole?”

The question has the effect of making them laugh and grin. “Didn’t the Doc tell you?” Ben asks.

“No, the Doc didn’t tell me.”

“Well he darn well should have,” another says.

“Doc’s messin’ with your head if he didn’t tell you.”

“So why don’t you tell me?”

Ben scratches his head. “For us, it’s not verbal.” More nods of agreement. “No way a man with an active wormhole can talk about it.”

“And we all got them.”

“Even the Doc.”

“Even you, probably, or you wouldn’t have come.”

“That’s right. And you sure wouldn’t want to learn from us if you didn’t have your own wormhole.”

Silence. I wonder where Dr. Christmas Bride has hidden himself. The men speak in mutters inaudible to me, then Ben steps forward.

“We can’t explain wormholes, but we can show you the original.”

“Right,” they agree in a mumble.

“We call it the Great Wormhole, but it’s not really.”

“Right. The Great Wormhole is life on earth.”

“But that’s too big an idea for us. So we stop the investigation at
our
great wormhole, even though in reality it’s only local to us.”

“Exactly.”

Now I’ve lost the plot entirely—or they have. “So,” I say, “let’s go. Let’s go find the Great Wormhole.”

“Really?” Ben says.

“Sure,” I say.

They mumble together some more in their impenetrable dialect. “We’re scared it might totally freak you out,” Ben explains. “They demand that I warn you it might freak you out. Not the same as the way it freaks us out, but just the same…”

“I’ll take my chances. My head and I have been through a lot together.”

This makes them chuckle.

“He says his head and him have been through a lot together.”

Now they are all looking at me fondly and chuckling.

Without another word Ben leads me to one of the huts at the far end of the compound. It is just about intact, although it looks as if it might succumb to the jungle within a year. Above the door someone has painted in crude letters the legend
Great Wormhole.
Underneath are the words
Museum of American War Atrocities.
I stop to stare at Ben.

“We copied the one in Saigon,” Ben explains. “All the exhibits are from original pictures, but we couldn’t reproduce the glass jars with ground stoppers they keep the Agent Orange fetuses in, so we just took photographs. It’s pretty much a faithful reproduction—except for the name, of course. You go to Saigon now, it’s called the
War Remnants Museum.
” He pauses before entering. With a gesture of resignation, as if to say,
Here, you might as well know it all,
he slips a hand into an inside pocket and takes out a very worn snapshot. “The Doc encourages each of us to carry one, so we can remember who we’re not anymore. He keeps a snapshot of himself just the same.”

There are plenty of creases in it and the color has faded, but it is still possible to recognize the muscular and rather beautiful young man with long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, holding an M-16 and looking stoned. He is not in uniform, however; his magnificent shoulders and biceps are left bare except for the straps of his dungarees.

“Special Forces?”

He stares at me with such stress that I wonder if he is going to explode. Then he starts to relax again. “Yeah, that’s right. I was the kind who volunteered for everything. Volunteered once too often. Special Forces, then MKUltra. Ultra liked to recruit from Special Forces. Never thought it would be my head that caved, though. Never thought Uncle Sam himself would do that to me.”

His features go through a complex rolling ritual that ends with an expression of psychotic wonder. It is a war, certainly, that is playing across his face and, I suppose, the rest of his body, nerves tensing and relaxing, the left fighting the right, one side of his face malevolent, the other retaining the gentle resignation of old age. Old age wins. The violence subsides. It was as if I could experience his demons, watch them do battle with angels, lose the fight, and slink away: Armageddon shrunk to a few ivory cells in one man’s brain. Now he looks up at me.

“We can go in now. I’m okay with it now. I think.”