Bible of the Dead

Chapter 45

‘I am Soriya. Chemda is my sister. And you -’ the gun was pointed at Sen, standing defiantly on the top step, ‘You, of course, are my grandfather. The man who did this to me.’

The young Khmer woman took off a wig and Jake saw the scar on her bald scalp.

‘When I was six months old.’

The scar was faded, almost white.

Soriya Tek turned to the Chinese men, the other men with scars, with their rifles hoisted or pointing. They were the same mutinous guards from the back gate, the men who had tried to bleed Jake out. She spoke to the men.

‘Here. Just as I promised you. Revenge. Here. Now.’ A step forward; a blunt gesture. ‘Kill them all, except for her,’ Soriya pointed at Chemda, ‘and him.’

Soriya was pointing at Jake.

‘He is one of us. See the scar. Spare him. Kill the rest.’

An uncertainty prevailed. Some of the men moved towards the terrace, others lingered; Soriya said, more loudly: ‘Tā shì w men měi yīgè rén. Bèijiàn tāshā s , qíyú!’

The men moved, properly commanded. In moments the terrace was crowded with the guards, Jake could smell the sweat on them. Beer and yak butter and dirt. Sen was led down the steps, then Fishwick, and Tyrone.

Only Tyrone was struggling, shouting. Only Tyrone was fighting.

‘Jake, for fuck’s sake, tell them. Tell them, dude! Fucking tell them! I’ve got nothing to do with this -’

The mob of guards was dragging Tyrone to the nearest cliff, just a few metres away; the cliff plunged, gruesomely, right down to the heaven villages. Maybe half a mile or more.

‘Jake, please, fucking please, Jake. Tell them!’

Jake observed Tyrone’s struggling. He considered, clearly and logically, the fact that Tyrone had betrayed him: no matter that the surgery was a success, Tyrone had risked Jake’s life for his own purposes. Did he deserve to live? Maybe not. And there was another factor to be considered: if Tyrone was dead then Jake had no rival, he could tell his own story. Make all the money. Jake stepped down the terrace, Chemda followed him. He approached his friend. His ex friend. He gazed into Tyrone’s terrified eyes.

‘Mate,’ said Jake. ‘I’m sorry.’

He stepped away.

The men dragged Tyrone the last metre to the edge of the cliff. Chemda was gazing at Jake, appalled; Jake didn’t care.

Let Tyrone die.

Now the American was crying. The hard-assed Tyrone Gallagher was sobbing like a child, and pleading for his life.

‘Please, no, Jake, pleeeeeease.’

Soriya gestured.

Tyrone was thrown over the cliff. Jake peered over. His friend actually twirled in the air, the drop was so huge. The spectacle was fascinating. Jake watched his friend smash against an outcrop of rock, an interesting pink blur of blood showed the body exploding with the impact. The corpse bounced and disappeared into the gorge.

Julia was crying.

Soriya turned to Fishwick.

‘Him next. Tā de xià yīgè.’

Fishwick was dragged to the side of the cliff by the sweating guards. The sun shone down on them all, harsh and uncaring. The neurosurgeon was not even struggling, his expression was resigned. His grey ponytail hung limply in the sun.

But Chemda intervened.

‘No, please no – don’t kill him!’

Soriya turned.

‘Why not?’

‘I am your sister, am I not? Your twin sister? Do this for me. Spare him.’

Soriya paused. A brief flash of emotion crossed the killer’s dark impassive face. Illegible emotion: sadness, grief, something profound and repressed. Jake watched, deeply intrigued. Julia was staring his way.

‘For my sister?’ Soriya gestured to the guards. ‘Ach. What does it matter. Let him go. I don’t care. But I will kill my grandfather. Bring me the axle.’

Fishwick was released; Sen was pushed to the edge of the precipice. The pine trees whispered in a mountain breeze; the gorges yawned, dark and hungry.

‘Kneel,’ said Soriya.

The grandfather knelt. Sen looked up, and said, very quietly:

‘How did you get past the main guards? The inner barrier?’

Soriya shrugged. ‘They thought I was Chemda. They were confused.’ She waved a hand at the sweating, scarred men, the severed men. ‘These other guards, your mistakes, they have decided to help me. I discussed this with them many months ago. I came here in secret. We agreed to all of this. They agreed. You invoke no loyalty, Sen. You mutilated so many. There is no one to help you. Everyone in the laboratory has scattered. They know the PLA is coming.’

Sen smiled.

‘But you think this upsets me, daughter? Please. I am not grieved. I am not ashamed, I am proud of you. I wanted to create the perfect communist child. And behold: I succeeded. Because here you are, guilt-free, devoid of mercy, and purely logical. My beloved granddaughter. Biologically atheist.’

‘You gave me away. How beloved is that?’

‘We thought you were a failure! You were taken in the anarchies, the dilapidations, when the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed in Anlong Veng. I never knew what happened to you, do you understand, my child? I didn’t dare hope that you had lived, the baby with the seizures, the fits, and yet, when I began to hear of these pitiless slayings, these cruel and clever murders, I knew. I aspired, Soriya, I hoped that you lived, that you thrived. I sensed you were coming, and I wanted to see you. So I could compare you with your superstitious sister, the control experiment. See if you had evolved. And I regard you now with true delight. My wonderful and beautiful experiment. My perfected, liberated and entirely Godless granddaughter.’

Soriya had taken a rusty iron bar from one of the guards. A car axle.

‘I am not a granddaughter, I am not even a woman. I am not a man either. I am nothing. You made me into a nothing. Barely human. You severed me from everything. A freak with no breasts. See.’

She tugged open her shirt. Jake winced at the pale scar tissue she briefly exposed. A double mastectomy: two more wounds.

‘By the time I was eighteen, I was desperate. Why was I so sick in the head? What was wrong with me? Why did I feel that something was wrong, something was missing? So I began to think: maybe I was the wrong sex. And I went to Bangkok. And I had surgery. Sex reassignment.’ Soriya sighed tersely, and rebuttoned her shirt with one hand. She went on: ‘The surgeons cut off my breasts, took out my womb – and gave me hormone injections. Testosterone. And they told me to walk like a boy. This was meant, or so I hoped, to make me better. Turning me into a kind of katoey. A she-he.’ She snarled at her grandfather, and clutched the iron bar tighter. ‘Yet it didn’t work. Of course. I was just angrier than ever. I had mutilated myself for no reason. I went back to America. Went back to being a girl. With no breasts. Mutilated. A man with no penis. Then I joined the army. At that, I was good, a surprisingly strong young woman. All those testosterone injections, all the steroids. So all this has been useful. It has helped me get here, where I can kill you.’

Sen’s smile was gone; for the first time Jake saw con fusion on the old man’s face.

He mouthed a word but Soriya cut him off.

‘Turn that way. Turn that way. Cheung Ek. Tuol Sleng. Highway Five. This is for everyone who died. For all the people killed by communism. For the country you beheaded. Turn that way.’

The first shudder of fear trembled at Sen’s mouth.

‘You really think that I should die-’

The iron bar swung into the back of Sen’s head: the sound of the skull splitting was pulpy, organic, a plashing crack. The brains squirted into the dust, the broken head gaped open, pornographically. Soriya sneered at the sight, then she kicked the twitching body off the edge of the cliff.

‘Now, you, give me a gun.’

One of the guards handed a revolver to Soriya.

‘Throw me off the cliff when I’m finished. At least I can kill myself without guilt. The one thing they gave me.’

She turned and walked a few metres down the cliff and put the gun to her head, and like she was slaughtering a hog with a bolt, she blew her own brains out. Another shower of blood, another splatter of bone.

The weeping sound was Chemda – she had turned away from the scene, crying. Jake watched, absorbed. He watched as the scarred men did their duty: Soriya’s twitching body was hurled off the cliff. Vultures circled down the gorge, seeking the carrion.

Patches of blood and splinters of bone were glistening in the sun. A yak stared placidly at the men, who had already begun to disperse. The guards were drifting away, some were now running.

Within moments, Fishwick, Julia, Chemda and Jake were standing on the edge of Balagezong village. Quite alone. The wind murmured in the yunnanese forests, soft breezes fluting their grief.

Or was it grief? Where was the grief?

Jake touched the scar on his head. It was stinging. He could feel the pain in his mind at war with the clarity. Guilt was still there, in his mind; yet he could not connect with it; it was a cherished poem he had forgotten, a beauti ful song he could not quite recall. Just like his love for Chemda.

He felt suddenly blinded. He was blind to something. He had lost a sense. How could he have done that, to Tyrone? Why didn’t he feel remorse?

As he touched his own face, he realized he had wetness on his fingers. Astonishingly, he seemed to be crying. But he didn’t know why.

‘Chemda,’ he said, ‘what have they done to me?’

She reached for his hand. Jake could feel the moistness, like tears, on his face, but he didn’t know what it was for. He wasn’t crying. He was just leaking. He was just fucking leaking.

He was a machine, a dead battery, he was Soriya, he was pitiless. A soft machine leaking oil.

Jake hunched down. He wanted to make himself small, to hide from the world. This was bitter and disastrous, everything was futile.

Chemda stooped and kissed him and she whispered:

‘There is something we can do.’