The Cause (4 page)

“Ten years?” I asked.

“Ten fucking years,” Brock repeated.

“It’s what I heard too,” Split said. “Then he went off and formed The Abattoir.”

“That’s a long time to be sitting around beating your meat,” Mir said. We shook our heads in agreement. We were knee-deep now, and a lot closer to being thrown out into the undefined. The buzz of it all had us feeling dizzy.

All of us knew the legends pertaining to The Conductor. Stories that grew like vines around the barracks of The Farm—how he stood circled against four men and kung-fu’d them into oblivion. Gladiator talk of him with swords and shields. They talked of his deeds as if he were Achilles—untouchable, unbreakable, lofted into the realm of great warrior beyond death. But legend is carcinogenic to truth. It takes ancient voices to spread it through miracle or churchlike indoctrination, poisoning real events with myth and improbability. A good legend lifts the realm of reality while maintaining a thin sense of realism, and this is what I thought was going on here. So while I listened, the cynic in me took it all in with sprouting seeds of doubt.

Split, the Spanish Monkey, bowed out of the circle. Split was a skinny, hirsute Hispanic, ex-Army second-generation Americana
go-getter who could talk the ears off an elephant. He ended up being part of the EOD squad in Afghanistan—one of those guys putting on the eighty-pound dome of ignorance in one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, sniffing out suspicious backpacks and rigged-up cars. He played with wire cutters the way a mongoose played with fangs. Split had cojones of a torro. Bullet-spun eyes doing tangos with pliers, pupils pulsing with each clip, anticipating the burst of a fiery flash. The death faces he saw in the IEDs were snapping shots of him, holding him in the lens for a sticky instant, silent, ephemeral, like a wisp of breath before his internals would be rocketed over a block’s radius. “Blood like dust,” he used to say. “Smithereens.” That’s how the king of nicknames accrued another—Split Smithereens—a name ringing to one day be blood dust on a killing field.

The social animal of the crew, he made rounds between the huddled groups, popping in and out of circles like a fish-begging porpoise. He stopped to see Briana and Chloe, the two chicks who were accepted and had the nuts to come. Briana had an Indian look where Chloe was Arab-looking. Most of us figured they were being groomed to bait a Middle Eastern prince funding terrorists. Briana was the shorter one—five-foot-four and fast as hell. A chick whose fitness challenged the toughest of the men. She had run the Boston Marathon in two hours twenty-five minutes. She was a flat-chested, loud-mouthed, feisty woman, whom Mir jokingly nicknamed the Energizer Bunny, coming up with it when he said she would fuck like one if any of them got the chance. No one had, but the name stuck and everyone called her Bunny.

Outside the hangar, the sun was almost up. I walked out into the fresh air and took a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs until they throbbed. Out in the distance, a couple of Stealth drones were high up in the sky monitoring airport landings. I shook my head and turned my gaze and let my eyes chew up the speckled sky where the stars were bursting through. Through my shirt, I
felt the cut-out photo of the Earth taped to my chest. It was wrapped up in a protective plastic covering, old and warn. Most of the times, I taped surrogate encyclopedia cut outs, but this time it was the real one, the one I had kept. It was coming along with me for the journey, and it made me recall the first time I saw it.

I was fourteen, a year after the first family camping trips where, proud-as-a-peacock, I took my new telescope out for my first moon viewings. I was in the library reading an encyclopedia, dreaming of the purity of distant worlds as I read about the Milky Way. A stack of books surrounded me, and I was reading about black holes and quasars.

Images of the dingy neighborhood floated into my mind—the graffiti on sides of 7-Elevens and squatter houses, trash and litter tossed about gutters and sidewalks, broken 40-ounce bottles like mortar rounds glassed up on pot-holed streets, the broken-down cars on front lawns jacked up, drawn-and-quartered with the tires pulled off. My young mind asked why we had to live there, which led to a simpler question—how could my father, a garbage man, afford a telescope when we barely had the green to make it out of the city? I had never questioned it before that moment.

He had found it in the bin of some rich house and wrapped it up for me. I thought back—no tag, no operating instructions, no fresh new box. He claimed it on the fruits of his labor, telling me how he penny-pinched for years. I imagined the moment, gazing through his eyes when he found it, a jump of surprise when he saw it poking out of a cellophane bag in a big green trash container.
A telescope
, he said with glee, eyes lighting up. He probably breathed a sigh of relief. Now he wouldn’t have to scrounge enough money away for a birthday present. He wouldn’t have to renege on promises of payment for good grades. He could stretch the enormity of it out and use it for a couple of years, which he did (“Now, if your grades slip, I’m gonna take it straight to the pawn shop.”). Perhaps he had to
scuffle with Charles, his partner. Perhaps he had to make some difficult promises. But one day, like any other when he would burst out of the house before the sun cracked the sky, before the traffic jams veined the city, the morning smog smoked up the atmosphere, he would find something. Later that day, he would bring it back home around mid-afternoon when I was at school. He would smell like banana peels and flat Dr. Pepper, reeking of week-old fish and a thousand other mixed-up smells all clinging to his tan uniform. Work gloves would be shoved in his back pocket, stiff like the tails of two cocks fighting. This gift he would bring back for me and only me. Not for my brother, who couldn’t name another planet other than the one his two feet were standing on, and who hated being dragged away from his ‘hood’ on astronomical campouts.

That day in the library, when I was fourteen and growing like a weed, I cut out the Earth from the encyclopedia and shoved it in my pocket. I strutted out onto the sidewalk and held it high in the air in front of me. A crescent moon gleamed in the upper atmosphere. The sun-split blue horizon shimmered to a darker indigo over the black expanse. The sky was zipped open by a pair of parallel contrails, ribs holding the guts of the Earth inside. I held the picture over the toenail moon and imagined me up there, looking back at the me down here. In the picture, I saw the Earth as an iris peeking into the dark void, and was awed by the question of God and if there was ever an end.

Now I was standing outside a hangar watching the day come into focus, the sun crisping a sheet of clouds into a beautiful pink to welcome a new day. Somehow a fiery intuition burning inside me knew this life was over. My hand was still over my heart, feeling the rim of the photo strapped to my chest. The Earth beat under my palm, and I felt I was going to burn up into ashes as the sun crept into the horizon. I thought the moment could last forever, lingering as long as I didn’t exhale.

Then, a woman’s voice behind me asked, “So what are you
thinking?”

I turned around to see Briana staring at me. “I’m thinking it’s going to be a long flight.”

“Could be.” She paused a moment. “But that’s not all you’re thinking about, is it?”

This was Bunny. She had a way of getting in your business. She had her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Temple, and it was just her natural proclivity to be curious. I was silent. Finally, she threw up her arms in the air. “Okay. Keep it to yourself. I won’t press you.”

“What exactly do you want me to say and I’ll say it.”

“What’s on your mind—it’s the same as what’s on everyone’s mind.”

“And that is?”

She scoffed, blowing air out of her lower lip. “We’re all scared, man. You’re not a wussy if you admit it.”

I laughed. “Scared? I’m not scared. Save your shrink degree for The Abattoir, Bunny.”

“You’re all fine,” she said. “Just like always.”

I smiled and winked at her. Out in the distance, a half a mile down the road, came the faint flicker of headlights. A black van appeared. Someone trotted out of the hangar while Briana walked back in. The guy went and opened the chain-linked gate. The van pulled in and parked among the six others. Grus and Bunker jumped out with their driver, Bunker with a wide grin on his face. He bounced toward me and yelled out, “Thought I wasn’t going to make it, didn’t you?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Striding past me towards the hangar he said, “Look at you trying to bag the Energizer Bunny while I’m away.”

Grus walked past. “We had to wait for Elliot and Harold, both of whom didn’t show.”

“Pussies.”

“Maybe,” Grus said, “or just smarter than the rest of us.”

Then it started in earnest. A guy in a dull-green camouflage jumpsuit walked up to us with a clipboard. “Sanders, Richards, O’Donnell, Davis, Pugs, Blanchard—you’re out. You can go home.”

“What the fuck?” Pugs said, losing his temper. “Why even bring us here if you’re just going to boot our asses right back?”

“Decisions of who goes are made last minute by The Abattoir. You didn’t make the cut.”

“That’s bullshit,” Blanchard roared. “You got to give us a reason!”

“It doesn’t say,” the airman said, avoiding eye contact. “It never says. But that’s the way it is. It’s their plane, and without their approval, you don’t get on.”

The airman scribbled on his clipboard while the six drivers formed a tight wall around him. More argument, but the airman stood his ground, waiting for them to leave. When they were finally driven out, the airman asked if we knew what was going to happen next. A Japanese guy named Kumo stepped forward, ready to take us up in a plane. Words were brief. We were led into a large room inside the hangar, black-bagged, drugged, and then all thirty-two of us, one by one, slipped into dream and hallucination, time like a piston compressing and expanding until we reached our destination.

We rose dressed in medical robes, dry-mouthed and foggy from a drug-induced haze, Kumo nudging us awake with a dirty bare foot. We found ourselves spread out on cots inside a mildewed plywood barrack, trees punching through sawed-out holes in the roof. My clothes were piled next to a sports bag full of my personal belongings. I leafed through the pile of clothes to find my Earth photo still tucked in the pocket of my undershirt. Briana and Chloe were hastily putting on their clothes under the covers.

A case of water sat on the floor in the middle of the room.
Each of us rushed to get one, but something was off. I did a head count.

“Who’s missing?” Conroy asked. He had noticed too. Three guys were missing. Guzzling his water, he broke off and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

Conroy stood in my vantage point, blocking my view. His dark, gun-barrel eyes danced in his head glaring at someone beyond his spiked-up jet-black hair. As he moved to the side, a figure emerged. We saw the grotesque form of a man appear. He sat furtively hunched over, the weight of his bulbous head pushing him into a coil. His lopsided jaw twisted sideways on his face, and his cheeks were severely sunken. His head was a fat club, body a stick, and eyes with round black pupils more animal than human. Around his neck, the skin was a splotchy café au lait.

“Where did you come from?” Bunker asked.

“The same place as you,” the stranger said. “The womb.”

“Not from my mother’s,” Bunker said with a laugh.

The man glared at him as if he were staring at an alien, reversing the look we were giving him.

“Are you military?” I asked.

“No,” the stranger said. “My name is Uriah, and I have come to train, just as you.”

“When did the entrance requirements drop?” Bunker said.

“I’ve earned my spot,” the stranger said.

While the others looked on, Mir, the Peepshow Perv, shrugged and went back to pinning up centerfolds above his cot. “We’re out here now,” he said. “Expect the unexpected.”

Bunker smirked at the comment, then began calling the man “Clubhead,” to which the stranger replied, “You’ll be the first one I make an example of.”

As Bunker went at him, Kumo barged back inside, eyes aglow with the fresh morning heat. “Lineup outside. Now!”

As Kumo turned, Conroy called out, “What happened to the
others?”

“They were left. They never made it here. Now move your asses outside.”

The humid land gave us no clues to where we might be. Perhaps Africa. Perhaps Central or South America. Perhaps India. Perhaps Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Somewhere with sticky terrain and boiling air. Our bodies were in constant drip. Shirts were damp and mottled with sweat, our faces waxy and glistening.

We were deep in a dense jungle surrounded by a rampart of trees. Animal, reptile, and insect sounds reached our ears—the howling of monkeys, the croaking of frogs, the layered screeching of a thousand different insects. Our voices thrummed strangely in tune to the cacophony in the midst of the bombed-size clearing we stood in. The whole jungle was a humungous breathing being, and we were stuck in the stomach of it. We were food, the prey for this place, and any sense of free will we must have had melted away when the clouds rolled in.

The rain trickled at first. We stood there silent in two rows of fifteen each. We stood stiff-backed and straight-shouldered waiting patiently under the light drizzle while Kumo sat on a tortoise-sized stone whittling a stick into an arrow with a shiny nine-inch Bowie. Occasionally, he gazed up at us, rotating his eyes over ours, staring into our souls. Then he would shake his head gravely and go back to shedding the stick.

We watched Kumo and wondered how much he knew, how important he was. His face was elongated and oblong. A skin-headed Japanese, gaunt and lank with wide, insect eyes. He was taller than he should have been for a Jap. My height, six-foot-two, minus the meat. His smile, boyish under a praying mantis face.
He wore a pair of fatigue shorts extending to the knee. Bare-chested and bare-footed, muddy with droplets of rain glistening off his face, he seemed animalistic, a jungle character, a Jap Tarzan with stretched out simian arms—arms that could throw a jab on the button of your nose from ten yards away. I glanced around at the others looking at him. Our thoughts brooded without conclusion.

After a while, whispers broke out through the lines. Kumo told us to be silent. We should stand and listen to what the jungle was telling us. And so we did. For four more long hours. It felt like we hadn’t eaten in a day. None of us was sure of the amount of time that had passed, but this was a new day, and the day before it we had left early in the morning. We were still drowsy from the drugs. Thirst, once again, set in. One of the men on the front line, David Rigby, began to slouch, tilting his head, slowly drifting off. Kumo, whittling with his knife, glanced up and saw him. He bounced up from his seat with a stone in his hand, and in a flash threw it at Rigby. The stone had been the size of half a fist and hit Rigby hard on the forehead. Rigby crumbled to the ground. Kumo shouted for no man to move. We obeyed, standing more rigidly than before. Then he went up to Rigby with his nine-inch Bowie and bent down over him. Rigby’s head bled into his closed eyes. Kumo traced the tip of the blade around Rigby’s face, dug a bit into the skin of his cheek, perhaps to see if Rigby was really out cold. Then he stood up and grabbed some zip ties from his pocket. He hogtied the bleeding man and dragged him toward the woods. Then he opened a trap door to a hole in the earth and slid Rigby into it. It would be the last I saw of David Rigby.

By mid-afternoon, a thicker set of clouds moved in, grey and languid, as if they had all the patience in the world. Floaters rolling like tanks across the atmosphere from a strengthening squall. Kumo gazed up at the sky and spoke for the first time since we were silenced. “Lesson from the heavy rain,” he said,
snickering at us. “Now you will start to learn bushido.”

The rain fell in heavy drops and plunked on our heads. Out in the distance we saw more thunderclouds, purplish giants, swirling in wind-sheared, dark-grey cylinders up into the stratosphere and moving fast. The sky split and lightning jolted out of the pregnant clouds, murderous rain pouring furiously, sheets of it like curtains in the distance. I peered down the line. There were others peeking about. Kumo stood there with his severe eyes bulging out at us. Slowly the group came to attention—feeling the purpose without words or communication. This was a test.

The thunderclouds swept in on us. Lightning lit up the sky, cracking into the forest, the storm coming to humble us as its weight sunk us deep into the mud. Wind slapped our faces. The sideways rain needled our bodies as hot as stinging fire ants. Kumo sat there, sometimes peering at us with madman eyes while taking a pause from whittling sticks and fitting them with arrowheads.

After an hour, the rain lightened and finally the showers subsided and the jungle once more came alive with insect noise. Then he appeared like a phantom out of the woods, stepping out from the steam wafting off the forest. None of us laid an eye on him until he was right in front of us. He was shorter than I had imagined—five-foot-ten or -eleven, no more. He could have been Goliath the way the men had spoken about him. I imagined a Leviathan. And while I had heard only small stories and anecdotes—how he was called The Conductor for his legendary patience, how in his best days, if you were in his radius, you were a living corpse—I didn’t put much belief in the small bits of chatter. Knowing we were drugged and brought here, I sensed an inflation of the truth. Stories of voodoo. Stories to psych you out. Tall tales.

Now that he was here, Kumo stood up. He was rugged-looking, dressed in fatigues with muddied boots. He seemed to carry the jungle with him. Moss and mud caked his face. Hair
was slathered and damp, stringy and dripping, melting from his head. He walked over to Kumo, greeting him by placing a hand on Kumo’s heart. Kumo did the same. A beetle scurried over his neck and he simply let it roam.

Three others slithered out of the forest. Those whom, with Kumo, would later be known as the Sons of Liberty, Ahanu the Native American, Des, and straggle-bearded Merrill. The leader craned his neck watching them, gave them a little nod and tipped them a smile, one laced with brotherhood and familiarity. He raised his hand. When he spoke, the first words out of his mouth were this:

“Welcome to The Abattoir. My name is Seee. And now I will tell you a little parable about life, which in contrast to its words, is what life is truly about.”

He placed a hand on Kumo’s shoulder, looked at him as if this were the beginning of something they had done many times. Then he turned to us and began.

“A man died and went to Hell and sat around a table of fire with bodies burning around him. In the center of the table was a pitcher of an exotic drink steaming at the rim. He was given a glass and drank and never had he tasted anything so divine. He asked where the drink came from. A flaming soul sitting at the table said to him, ‘It comes from the last remaining Lushing Tree that stands in an oasis in the Sahara. Its fruit falls into a hole and arrives here.’”

I glanced down the line. The same baffled expression was ubiquitous. Split covered his mouth, fighting back a yawn.

“The man then went to Heaven and through a maze of clouds entered a chamber where on a table this same drink was being poured from a golden jug steaming once more from the rim.”

He moved a couple of paces toward us, eyes moving into ours, forcing us to attention.

“Amazed that perhaps the same drink existed in Heaven, he was eager for a glass and given one. When he drank, he felt
excruciating pain. Fire spread throughout his veins and his whole body felt as if it were ablaze. Once the pain subsided, he cried out, ‘How can this be—a drink that brings so much pleasure in Hell, yet so much pain in Heaven? Is it the same fruit from the only remaining Lushing Tree?’ Satan appeared and answered him, ‘Yes, it is from the same tree.’

“‘But how could this be?’ the man exclaimed. ‘It must fall from a different branch.’

“‘Do you believe the anatomy of a tree is any different from one branch to the next?’ Satan asked.

“The man contemplated this and finally said, ‘No, I do not.’

“‘Then how do you explain this difference?’

“‘Maybe it is the route to each destination which is different, and the route changes the characteristics of the fruit.’

“‘The fruit has not changed, nor the passage from where it came,’ God said. ‘Only what you see has changed.’”

The air stiffened. Silence. Thirty men staring at him and not one dared utter a word. The sound of the jungle grew louder in our ears, layer after layer colliding in intersecting waves. We waited for a cue, a direction from him, a question, or simply a word. The insects throbbed with the sound of his pacing boots slogging in the mud. Time simply ticked on.

The meaning of the parable was simple enough to grasp—God and Satan—Heaven and Hell were the same. As was the allegorical fruit. Perception had changed, and this was the point. But I was only partially right at the time. Later I would understand another interpretation. The Lushing Tree was “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” legal speak for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

After another minute, he led us to the point he wanted to make. “Does good and evil really exist? Is the universe just? Becoming a warrior of The Abattoir requires you to look at things differently, to see the truth and not deny its existence, to stretch yourselves beyond what you currently know and accept. And
when battle comes, to understand clearly what it is you are fighting for.”

He moved in front of us, inspecting the eyes of each man. “Besides becoming the best warrior you can be, you will learn new philosophies. You will study the rituals and training of the great warriors of the world. You will study the common denominator to all of them, which is that a great warrior comes from the courage of the internal spirit rather than the brutishness and power of the external body. You will learn sacrifice, brotherhood, weaponry—both new and old. You will learn new languages. You will learn how to get away from your enemies. You will learn technology—some of which you’ve never seen before. You will learn fear. Today, you will be born to a new world that you never knew existed.”

He was silent for a moment, allowing the veins popping out in his forehead to simmer.

“But listen carefully. I am a fair man today, but this I do not always promise. You will have one week here to decide whether or not you want to stay. One week to decide whether or not you want to be pushed back into the womb. After that, you are here, for better or worse.”

He moved among the two lines. “I will also tell you that of those who come here, only seventy-five percent survive. This camp is serious. The training you will receive is real and unforgiving. All of you,” he said sweeping his finger past each one of us, “all of you will change if you stay. You will not be the same person who came in here.”

It was my turn, and he passed his eyes into mine. I glared back seeking out a weakness.

“All of you who stand before me today might have killed someone in the past. None of you has killed in the manner you will kill if you stay.”

He tapped me in the chest with his index finger as if he were singling me out. “I will not lie. Some of you here might kill the
man standing next to you if I wish it. This is not a place to guard a conscience or covet moral dilemmas. You will be asked to do what civil society calls
horrendous things
, things that violate the social rules you have grown up with. What I want you to take away is this. I want you to imagine the worst thing you can possibly do to another person. I want you to sit down tonight and write out that list, whether that be cannibalism, chopping someone’s head off, or whatever the worst thought your brain can come up with. Then I want you to realize with uncertain doubt that that fear is in the realm of possibilities. Your lists will not be complete. This I promise. Do not doubt me on this score.”

He shed his sopping, mud-caked shirt and wiped away the grime on his face with it. Many years later this scene would play out in my mind, and I would wonder exactly what he was doing out there under the storm. Perhaps, letting the monsoon pour over him in some jungle clearing. I saw him laying supine, welcoming the incoming thunderclouds with open arms. The storm threw down streams on the lush land, Old Testament rain, rain that lasted for three hundred and seventy days. There he was bedding down with insects in the mud. Beetles, ants, earthworms crawled all over him. Seee with his eyes closed, absorbing every moment of it while he meditated on a future perhaps just as devious.

“So let’s begin with who has the guts to face me.” He took off his trousers and Kumo threw him a pair of boxing shorts.

Sometimes people do unexplainable things, cowardly or courageous. They react without thought or provocation. Is the act of the Good Samaritan who steps in front of a bus to save a jaywalker more for the sake of the other person or a deeper test of putting oneself in danger and facing one’s own mortality? Perhaps this question punctured deep into my thoughts at the time. Maybe it was Briana starting down the line looking me up and down with eyes asking if I was scared. Or perhaps it was purely boldness, an unfettered belief that I was superior, that I
could take him, or anyone. But even with a 16-2 MMA record, I remembered feeling surprised seeing my own traitorous left foot step forward out of the ranks in challenge of the one who offered it. Or maybe it was something simpler—the first reckless chance to make good on my promise to the station chief Pelletier.