Bible of the Dead (35 page)

Chapter 42

‘Please. Wear this, over your clothes. It is time for you to meet Chemda. We are going outside, and it’s a little cold.’

Sen was offering him a coat.

Two men came in, imperviously unsmiling Chinese guards, in some kind of uniform. They unlocked the shackle on Jake’s ankle. He swung his legs out of the bed and stood. As he did he waited for the sense of weakness in his limbs; yet he felt nothing. Nothing? Nothing. He felt quite fine. Completely normal. Yet also anguished.

What had they done to Chemda?

He would have taken on Sen and Tyrone, here and now – but the silent guards were armed.

Neatly piled on a table he found his clothes: clean boots and clean jeans, a neatly pressed, blue-striped shirt.

Dressed, and wearing the coat, escorted by the guards, Jake followed Tyrone and Sen through the door into a corridor, with a rectangle of silver and dazzling light at the end. A glass door.

Jake pushed the glass door and stepped onto a sunlit terrace and saw one man sitting at a large table laid with food for many; Jake recognized the figure from the photograph Julia had shown him: it was Colin Fishwick, a much older Colin Fishwick. The smile of Phnom Penh had been replaced by the sad sad face of Balagezong.

Balagezong.

Jake stared across the table on the terrace, at Balagezong. The laboratory complex was set on a vast butte of rock. Surrounding them, guarding them, even, was a hamlet of Tibetan houses, themselves surrounded by turnip fields and yak paddocks; a lane at one end of the village led to a white stupa where prayer flags rappled on a promontory of rock.

The sky was faintly veiled with mist; blue skies smiled behind the translucent mist, like Buddhist paintings under rippling silk
thangkas.

A noise. He turned.

Chemda.

She was approaching the table, her expression distant and opaque. He scanned her body and her head for signs of injury, but she seemed intact; yet the eyes were different, untrusting, clear but untrusting. He walked around the table and he embraced her and she kissed him.

The guards had hung back. Tyrone and Sen loitered at the other side of the table. Observing. They knew there was nothing Jake could do. He was imprisoned here, with his fate. He kissed Chemda again. And confirmed the bitter truth.

The kiss was different.

‘Chem?’

Detaching herself, from his arms, she said: ‘I’m OK. Thank you for trying to save me. Ah. Ah. What can I say.’

Her eyes said
I love you
but her words were worryingly staccato.

What had they done to her? She was different.

She pressed a hand flat on his chest and shook her head and a tremble in her mouth told him she was near to tears, she shook her head again – as if she were trying to say goodbye, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

All she said was:

‘I’m OK. They kept me here. Wouldn’t let me see you until they had done that thing. Their surgery.’

‘So you know it all? The whole story?’

Her dark eyes avoided his gaze, her voice was low and murmuring.

‘My grandfather, S37, my family, his role, I know it all. Sonisoy? Anlong Veng? All of it. Ah. What can we do now, what choice do I have? It is too late anyway.’

‘Chem?’

Her eyes lifted, they found his regard and she said: ‘How do you feel? How do you feel about me now, Jake? Now they have done this?’

He gazed at her and he gazed around and he surveyed the meaningless circle of summits, on this butte of rock, above the plunging and pitiless gorges. And he knew that what he really wanted was to have sex, maybe with Chemda, with her firm eager breasts. Or maybe with one of those cute Tibetan girls in the village, with their roseapple smiles.

But he didn’t love her. He wanted to fuck her. But he didn’t love her.
He didn’t love Chemda any more.

It was true. Why deny it? He just didn’t love her, not in that special ludicrous way. No. She was beautiful and sexy and he liked fucking her. For sure. She was a fine woman, intelligent, moral, and he respected her, he could imagine her as his wife, but love: that was all absurd.

He didn’t love her. Love was a neurochemical reaction, a disorder of the hormones, a ruse designed by nature to make men procreate and then hang around with some yowling brat for at least eighteen months until the trick of love expired like free software with a time limit, so no he didn’t love her but he still admired her and he desired her. And they were friends.

Jake happily smiled and kissed Chemda on the cheek and she looked at him fearfully and she said:

‘What have they done to you? Jake? Tell me? How do you feel?’

Her soft hand went to his head and she touched the top of his head and, as if he had been injected, he felt a stab of sharp pain.

His hand reflexively went to his head, to the scar. A scar? He had a scar on his head.

He was freshly scarred. The top of the forehead.

Chapter 43

The guards were at his side. They forced him to sit.

Tyrone sat besides him, and talked:

‘Don’t think of it as someone cutting out your soul, think of it as cosmetic surgery. Or laser tooth whitening! Don’t be a fucking pussy all your life.’

Jake stared at his friend. His ex friend. His mortal and immortal enemy. The world spun on an axis of inversion.

‘You did it already?’

‘We did it already. You were in a coma so we took the opportunity.’

‘But what – what was the point? I’m already an atheist.’

‘Ah, but
are
you? Or were you?’ Tyrone smiled. And the mountain air was as cold and bright as his smile. ‘Always struck me that you’re one of those people that
hates
God rather than actually not believing in Him. Take a long look at all that load of guilt, the guilt you carry, what is all that, but the same guilty God module working away in your head?’ Tyrone pointed at his own head, and twisted a finger.

‘But Ty you –’ ‘All that shit about your dead mum. And your sister. Don’t you ever want to draw a line, move beyond the guilt and grief? Dude, your dead mother has been sucking the life out of you for too long.
Get rid.
You are like someone born attached to a dead twin, and you’re still dragging the corpse. So we decided it was time to cut the cord.
Snip
!’

‘You fucker. You bastard.’

‘Me?’ Tyrone laughed. ‘Ungrateful. I arranged all this for you. Don’t you get it?’

‘How?’

‘Because I saw the story. Let Sen explain.’

Sen sat the other side of Jake. Chemda was sitting across the wide white table, her face covered with her hands. He wondered if she was crying. He didn’t care. He felt a certain unburdening – in that he didn’t care.

He didn’t care.

The Chinese man narrated, gesturing languidly at the lowslung concrete buildings:

‘This is, I like to believe, the most amazing laboratory in the world doing the most amazing work. But the Chinese have lost faith in us. You see? We used to be funded by the Chinese military, we were rewarded with proper guards and equipment and resources, precisely because we could manufacture those perfected soldiers for the PLA. But these days, it’s all change, always change.’

Tyrone stepped in:

‘All that organ harvesting, brain changing shit, it’s bad PR for the new superpower. And the Chinese ardour for com munism has abated now they’ve all got BMWs. So they got a bit dubious.’

Jake swivelled in his seat, Tyrone put a restraining hand on his shoulder:

‘You aren’t going anywhere, Thurby. So you may as well listen. You want to know what’s going on, right? So. As we were saying, Sovirom Sen is not so popular any more, he has been forced to employ his
mistakes.
Those guys with the scars at the back gate, who tried to pump out all your blood. They need a lot of blood for these surgeries – these guys have been told to take blood off unwanted guests, if they get the chance – but not just anyone. But they won’t listen. They’re a symptom. This place has problems.’

‘Still don’t. Just don’t get it. Why do it to me?’

‘
This
is why you should have stuck to the camerawork. You’re just a photographer, a monkey, a snapper. You’re not a writer, not a real journalist. You never really saw what a great story you had, here, did you? But I did, I sensed it, from the start. So I get to do it.’

‘You’re doing all this . . .
for the story?
’

‘Yes! And what a fucking story!’ Tyrone closed his eyes, and his voice stiffened: ‘Hard by the Himalayas, in the high green forests of wild north Yunnan, expert Chinese scientists have perfected the most astonishing neurosurgical procedure in history, the removal of religious belief, excised from living brains.’

He chuckled. ‘That’s not a bad opener, isn’t it? That’s my Pulitzer, right there. So yeah when Sovirom Sen came to me, asking for my help, explaining everything, yeah I saw how we could work together. I saw the synergistic possibilities.’

‘You did it for the job. Fuck.’

‘Sure. Because Sen needs money and backers for his experiments, to continue his work. Not least, he will need a new location, new backers, very soon – when Beijing closes him down. And to get these new funds he needs publicity, he needs the story
out there. He needs the world to know his success.
And that’s where I come in. I am going to write it up, me, me the real writer.’ A sly smile. ‘But
before
he gave me the whole story he said I needed to prove my credentials, prove my commitment, give him something he wanted – so, yes, I told him where you two were staying in Bangkok, so he could grab Chem, get her away, take her to China. I persuaded him not to touch you, because I am your friend! Your saviour! But I also knew this was only a stopgap.’ Tyrone stared Jake in the eyes. Unblinking. Then he continued:

‘Put it this way: I knew that no matter how many times I rescued your ass – you were
still
in love and you would come a-running after Chemda, and Sen would, eventually, try and
kill
you again for being an irritating bastard. And he would, eventually, succeed. But what could I do about this?’ Tyrone turned, for a moment, his profile framed by the blue Bala sky. ‘And then, a day later, as I thought about the story
, the way the story could work –
well then I had
another
worry, Jake: I realized that if I was gonna make the whole thing sing, give the story real emotional impact, I needed to convince people of the good work. The final and eventual success.’

He smiled, with an almost believable sincerity. ‘Because, let’s face it, this a hard sell. So many have been scarred or lobotomized. Mutilated. Turned into monsters. So I knew I needed a truly positive pay off, something for everyone to invest in, some powerful narrative to distract from the failures, some dazzling human interest, a personal case of a man whose life was transformed – for the better, Jake, so much for the better – by this incredibly new surgical technique.’ A tiny, theatrical hesitation. ‘And then I had my epiphany. Of course! I suddenly thoughta
you
, pal, old guilt-ridden superstitious
Jake Thurby
. I saw that I could kill several birds with one magnificent stone – if I made
you
the end of my story! I could finally save you from Sen and yourself – and at the same I had my brilliant ending.
You
would be my human interest, the man rescued from his guilt and neuroses by this neurosurgery. My denouement.
You.
So I told you where Chemda was being hidden, just
knowing
you would go straight to her. No need for any dangerous stuff on the streets of Bangkok, you would come to us. And so you did! And that’s where we are, despite a few hiccups. So you see? You get it?’ Ty actually winked. ‘Now here we are, you are a new man, a very different man, you are sitting in the sweet Himalayan sunshine – feeling cleansed and new.
And that’s my perfect pay off
, that brings the story to life! You are my
ending
. My Pulitzer. I thankyou.’

He did a small, sarcastic, vaudevillean bow to his audience. Jake bridled. The guard was standing close: hand on the butt of a pistol.

Sen gestured the guard to step back. And he turned to Jake:

‘Consider things, Jake. The wise man must always consider things. Isn’t it rather desirable to be rid of all that lumber, that trash, that compost at the bottom of the mind?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Perhaps so. But we didn’t do this very difficult procedure because we hoped you would become a drooling cretin, a palsied fool like Ponlok. We did this because we really
have
perfected the operation. Thanks to Colin Fishwick here, such a brilliant neurosurgeon, we have succeeded. And you are our latest success, the greatest success. Finally you are rid of religion, the ridiculous guilt, and shame and self-deception. Don’t you want to be rid of it? We all need to be rid of it.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘But I am correct, am I not? It is time we moved on as a species. At present we are still at the Klamath level. Have you ever heard of them? The Klamath are a Pacific tribe, in North America, they are my exquisitely ludicrous favourites, Jacob, my favourite example of the noxious and warbling stupidity of religion. The Klamath worship a flatulent dwarf goddess who wears a buckskin skirt and a wickerwork hat, and whenever the mosquitoes are especially malign on Pelican Bay the Klamath ask their midget goddess to fart away the mosquitoes, by farting out the wild west wind. They also believe the world was initially created out of a minuscule purple berry.’

Jake felt the cold wind on his scalp, the shaven patch where his hair had been, where his soul had been.

‘Are we any better than the Klamath, Jacob? Are we? When we take Holy communion or pray to Mecca or commune with the smirking Buddha we are, in essence, still requesting the sixty centimetre high dwarf goddess to fart away the mosquitoes, no?’

Jake inhaled; the world was drifting. He tried to fight the sensation. He knew it was pointless. What was done was, incredibly,
done.

He walked away from the table, and gazed across the silent chasms, to the silent peaks. The strangeness of it all was this: Tyrone was right, he felt clearer. Calmer.

Happier.