The 37th Mandala

PROLOGUE

It didn’t seem to bother the young couple that the museum stank of blood.

They walked arm in arm through the dim halls of Tuol Sleng, pointing at the watercolors of atrocities and commenting softly, laughing now and then, clinging to each other like giddy lovers under the ponderous scythe-blades of ceiling fans that hardly stirred the humid air. Khmer guards watched them pass, shifting their guns uneasily, as if they’d never seen anything like them. The American trailed them for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

He tried to picture them walking the red dust roads of the countryside, followed by every watchful eye, every suspicious gun—UN teams and Khmer Rouge alike. He himself drew little attention in Cambodia, looking like an aging Asia correspondent: a tall, overweight man with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail that drooped from under a battered canvas hat. He shuffled through the lower floors of Tuol Sleng in sandals and drab cutoffs, his camouflage vest draped over a grimy undershirt, the pockets packed with lenses, film, and filters; his shoulders, chest, and belly were slung with battered Nikons.

The smell should have bothered them a bit, he thought; even cattle balked in a slaughterhouse. It was the residual stench of old blood, never completely cleaned from between the checkered tiles of the schoolroom floors, never expunged from the cold brick stalls the Khmer Rouge had built to pen their prisoners. The journalist who’d steered him to the place had speculated that the German death camps must have been like this in the ’50s, before they’d been sterilized for tourists. Tuol Sleng’s curators had not bothered with disinfectant. The faint reek was more evocative than any number of placards describing the horrors that had made this place their home, more convincing and less susceptible to revision than any propaganda dispensed by the various regimes that had followed the reign of the Khmer Rouge.

In one of several rooms lined floor to ceiling with photographs, the American finally came close enough to eavesdrop on the pair. They were absorbed in their surroundings and in each other, oblivious to him.

“I see it almost as a Warhol piece,” the male said, his voice accented French. “In the repetition, the anonymity of the artist.”

“I think of Avedon,” said the woman, whose accent was German. “The coldness…”

“But with a lived-in look. Irving Penn.”

“Joel-Peter Witkin.”

“Of course, but without his staging, his artifice. This is so spontaneous. Unforced. It really makes all the difference.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Makes all the difference, the American thought, letting them wander off without him now, afraid of attracting their notice when all he really wished was to finish his work and get out of here, back to his hotel, then out of the country forever. There were too many ghosts in Cambodia, ghosts whose bodies had all too recently joined the dust; a million tortured souls floating in the red-flecked haze. Besides, he had already gone where the lovers were headed: past converted classrooms with wooden shutters thrown wide to let in a rose-tinged light that revealed faint blood crusts spreading in tidal swirls beneath bed frames fit with manacles. He stayed to scrutinize the walls they had been admiring for artistic effect, walls covered with before-and-after photographs of Tuol Sleng’s victims. Men, women, too many children: whole families. The torturers had been thorough in documenting their excavations of human flesh. On entering the extermination center—once a lycee, a yellowing relic of French colonial architecture—the captives had posed before the plain dropcloth with hopeful expressions; hopeful, yes, even knowing what they must have known about their photographers. A kind of willful blindness in the frightened eyes. The second in each pair of images showed the victims at the end of their stay, before deportation to the killing fields and mass graves of Choeung Ek, or burial in the courtyard of the high school.

He had explored Choeung Ek while the Ministry of Information processed his application to conduct specific, limited research in Tuol Sleng’s library. He had scuffed his sandals at the edges of the burial pits, bone dust gathering between his toes; he had counted a fraction of the skulls on display, arranged behind glass in order of sex and age (“Femalesenile Cambodian”); he had come up close to photograph the bole of a tree where infants’ brains were said to have been bashed out by the Khmer Rouge in order to conserve ammunition. Now he studied the photographs with a similar morbid fascination, as if looking for something he would not know until he saw it. Some of the victims bore tribal tattoos, or sak, like the ones he’d seen everywhere in the Thai refugee camps—the imprints of magical amulets. The photos revealed another kind of artistry on the part of the torturers—an excruciating attention to anatomical detail. But nowhere did he see the marks he sought. In any case, only a small sampling of the photographs were on display: Tuol Sleng had accommodated 17,000 in its few years of operation. That would have meant 34,000 portraits, of which only a fraction papered these walls. The handful of survivors—fewer than ten escaped Tuol Sleng at the fall of Democratic Kampuchea—had returned to create a survivor’s gallery, primitive paintings and drawings, brightly colored scenes of torture rendered as if by children. These latter he had inspected on prior visits, devoting particular care to the breasts of one watercolor woman whose nipples smoldered between red-hot pincers.

(The bluish blotch like a smeared tattoo above one areola had proved a splash of paint, nothing more convoluted.)

At last he heard bootsteps, hard and businesslike, coming down the main corridor. He went into the hall, where the small Khmer attendant was searching for him.

“All ready now. I take you up?”

“I know the way.”

The American slipped a wad of bills into his hand and pressed past him down the hall toward the stairs.

At the first landing, he paused and drew a pack of cigarettes from inside his vest. He lit one and watched the smoke swirl around his fingers, as if he might find what he sought in the whorls of soot. Below, he heard footsteps on the stairs, curious murmurs from the European couple. A guard called out and the steps retreated. He crushed out the cigarette without taking a puff.

On the second floor, only one door was open to him. Here stood the custodian of records, waiting impatiently. The bony, scarred Khmer looked irritated to see him again, but official arrangements had been made. He had no choice but to stand aside.

The small room was sweltering. It held very little but still felt crammed: two old desks, a filing cabinet, an ancient photocopier. A file folder rested on the farthest desk, under the window. The custodian gestured for him to sit. As he approached the desk, he passed a door that was slightly ajar, opening into another and much larger room. The American glimpsed shelves full of folders, student composition books, yellowing paper. A sampling of these journals were on display downstairs, confessions of crimes against the DK, written in Khmer and occasionally in French. The sheer number of folders was almost inconceivable: each represented a death, eked out page by page. The custodian, noticing his interest, quickly closed that door.

He turned his attention to the folder waiting on the desk, and grunted when he read the name written on the cover.

“This isn’t the file I asked for,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I said, it isn’t the file I—”

The custodian handed him a written request, in his own handwriting, stamped with the Ministry’s seal. It puzzled him for a moment, until he felt his fever’s resurgence. He sank down into the chair, hugging his guts, clenched over the table while bright dots swarmed his eyes and cold sweat came. When the moment of illness passed, he sighed and pulled the folder toward him.

“Yes?” said the custodian.

“Yes,” he agreed leadenly.

The custodian held out his hands. “Cameras.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Cameras. Now.”

Instead the American produced his wallet. Twenty bucks ought to have taken care of it, but the man struck the proffered money aside—a gesture he had never experienced in the city. He had a bad feeling now—a sense of his failure, and the trouble he’d be in. He put his wallet away, sensing that a larger bribe would only meet with greater resistance.

Again: “Cameras.”

The American glared for a moment, then unslung the straps and black bodies of the three FM2’s. In his sack was a copying stand, useless now. The Khmer piled the cameras on the other desk. Then he went to the other desk and sat staring out the window above the American’s head.

When the American set his bag on the desktop and unzipped it, the custodian started to his feet again. He took out a pen and a notebook. As the Khmer sank back down, he tipped the pen toward the copier. “I don’t suppose that thing works.”

The little man paled with anger. “You write by hand! Only by hand!”

“I’m kidding. Relax.”

Inside the folder was a stack of unlined paper an inch thick, each page dated, signed, and marked with a thumbprint. He riffled the sheaf, heart quickening when he saw the first mandalas flicking past, elaborate wheels with wavering arms and spiral centers. This was what he’d been looking for. The circles were enclosed in Khmer script, as if the entire confession were an exegesis on the nature of the symbols. Highly unlikely. The Khmer Rouge had not allowed their guests to discourse on metaphysics.

The American could not read Khmer. He noted instead how the handwriting deteriorated page by page, and then grew further obscured by reddish-black smears and splatters whose frequency increased toward the bottom of the stack. He went back to the beginning, stared for a moment at the first mandala, then drew his notebook closer and uncapped his pen. The custodian’s eyes locked onto him.

The wheel was carefully, intricately drawn, as if every jot of the author’s energy had been conserved for this task. Why had the KR interrogators tolerated the time it must have taken to set down the pattern? It must have been an enormous distraction from the task of confession; yet there were dozens, equally elaborate, scattered throughout the text.

He could not imagine how long it would take him to copy one, let alone all thirty-seven. The last thing he wanted was to spend days in this hot room, in this horrible museum, so drenched in the smell of blood that already he was ceasing to notice it. He did not want to become inured to this place, but he had no choice.

He was slightly surprised to find that he’d tucked a sheaf of tracing paper into his notebook. He could not remember bringing it. He laid one sheet atop the mandala and carefully began to trace the perimeter, which ringed a complex core of woven lines. Sweat from the edge of his hand caused the paper to crinkle; he had to take care not to smear the ink. Finished with the outermost lines, he began to work his way into the whorled center. This required great patience, a hand far steadier than his. He was no artist.

Stealing the file intact would have been the obvious solution, but he would have been the sole suspect in such a theft. He did not want to spend the rest of his life in a Cambodian prison. Nor could he fool himself into thinking he could make it as a fugitive to the nearest border. Cambodia was one vast mine field. No… he would have to trace each mandala by hand, however long it took.

Each line seemed impossibly long. He came upon tangles and involutions he hadn’t noticed until they enmeshed him—endless twists and curls, impenetrable thickets. He didn’t dare lift his hand from the paper. In order to rest, he had to anchor his penpoint in one place and close his eyes; but even then he continued to see the pattern throbbing behind his lids, swimming in the blood-reek, fanning the phosphene currents gently in time to a throbbing in his head. He heard a knocking, too brittle to be his heart, and opened his eyes to discover that his hand, unwatched, had continued tracing the shape. The pattern was complete now; and it had drawn itself in something like an instant.

The custodian stood at the door, peering into the hall. The Khmer began whispering, gesturing angrily. Glancing back, he gave the American a warning look, then opened the door just wide enough to slip out.

The American was startled to see the young Europeans outside. The man’s eyes met his for a jolting instant. His pupils constricted, expanded, tightened again. The woman gave him a smile and a nod. Then the door shut. Voices rose in a babble—the custodian quite upset, the Frenchman calming him, the woman speaking low and soothingly, almost cooing to him. Their voices had an empty, echoing quality in the corridor. He sensed that they were drifting away from him.

The mandala still burned in his eyes. Without further hesitation, as if he had planned for this moment, he took the folder to the copier. He touched the start button but got no response. The plug lay on the floor, below a wall socket. He plugged it in. The copier rattled to life. He didn’t want to know how much time he wasted waiting for the machine to warm up. He laid the first sheet, the same he’d traced by hand, on the glass. Light blazed beneath his fingers, sweeping along in a hot bar. The copier creaked like a metal insect singing in the hot afternoon, calling out to everyone in Tuol Sleng. Once the light had measured the dimensions of the page, he snatched the sheet from the glass and put down a second, which he had in readiness. He flipped through the folder looking for the third mandala, embedded in miserable script. Two different hands seemed to have been at work simultaneously: artist and author.

He quickly established his routine: lay down a page, wait for the machine to ready itself, hit the copy button, wait for the light to go on, wait for the slow scan to finish. Wait and wait and wait; flip through the folder, careful not to miss not a single mandala, getting each one ready to copy, all the time tensed for any sound from the halls—paranoid because the copier made such a racket that he knew he’d never hear the custodian returning. But he mustn’t think of that, mustn’t wonder what might happen if he were caught. His only concern was to copy the mandalas. Only that.

When he had copied the last sheet, he snatched the pages from the tray and quickly counted mandalas. Thirty-seven. That was that. The copy quality was surprisingly good. He yanked the plug from the wall, went back to his seat, hid the copies in his bag, and took up his pen, as if he had never stopped drawing. The copier was hot as an oven now, but why would the custodian bother to check it?

He sat for several minutes, pretending to trace a mandala, wondering how long he should keep up the charade. Anxious to leave, he wanted to ensure the custodian witnessed his departure.

He thought he heard the man speaking urgently from inside the records room. He put his head to the door, listening hard, then tested the knob. The door opened.

He crept to the left down the aisle, past a shelf crammed with notebooks, then peered around the end of the shelf into a corner of the room. The French boy was farthest into the corner, his black jeans tangled around his calves, his hips grinding against the custodian’s bony backside. The German woman knelt before the Khmer, her head bobbing at his groin. The custodian’s head was pulled back, his curving throat long and exposed, his eyes fixed on a circular mirror that the boy held in one outstretched hand.

The American must have made a sound, for the boy looked sidelong and gave him a slight smile, sleepily content as he pumped away. The custodian stiffened and trembled. The woman made a clicking noise as blood spilled from the corner of her mouth.

The American backed away, rounding the shelf, rushing for the other room. He had seen something, something—he had seen it but didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t want to know. He was through with his part of it; the rest had nothing to do with him. He tossed the folder on the custodian’s desk. A flat glassine packet slithered out and rustled to the floor.

He looked guiltily about to see if anyone were watching, then remembered the scene in the next room. No one cared what he did. He shoved the packet into his bag, on top of the photocopies. Then he bolted from the room, still working himself back into the tangled harness of camera straps.

After nearly tumbling down the stairs, he forced himself to stroll toward the exit. A group of drunken American businessmen had come into Tuol Sleng, mistaking it for another kind of museum. They turned around and around, some horrified, most of them clearly amused. He thanked the guards for all the help they had given him in the last few days, and then went out slowly, making sure he was seen leaving empty-handed.

In the streets he could breathe again. He strolled several blocks, slowing under shade trees, relishing the dusty air as if it were a sea breeze. Let it scour the blood-stench from his nose. Let the sun-drenched sights of Phnom Penh purge the unreal, cloistered nightmare of the library….

Out of sight of Tuol Sleng, he stopped and drew the glassine envelope from his pocket. Inside were several large photographic negatives. Fearful of exposing them to dust, he put the packet in his bag and hailed a cyclo to take him back to the hotel.

His bathroom was cluttered with bottles of developing chemicals, plastic trays, the craning neck of his enlarger. His photographs of burial pits, like a flowerbed of skulls, hung in the slimy shower stall. He considered printing the negatives right away, but his fever had returned. He collapsed on one of the twin beds, the glassine envelope resting on his chest. One at a time, he held the negatives up to the cloudy light that filtered through the dingy shades.

In the first, the subject stood naked before a dark background. Intricate white wheels emblazoned every visible inch of skin—skin the color of deeply tarnished silver. These were the very same mandalas scattered through the notebook.

Dizzy, he shut his eyes and saw the circles, now printed on his retinas, begin to spin.

The next two photographs were worse.

The second showed the same subject, now extremely emaciated, suspended by the wrists against a rough wall. His mouth was a bright silver smear, melting at the corners. The blazing white symbols that covered his flesh burned brighter than ever. This was bad enough, but the third picture was worst of all. No sign of the mandalas remained; they had been erased from the subject’s flesh. His entire body now glowed like the moon, luminous silver all over. A puddle of mercury shone on the floor at his dangling feet.

It took the American some time to realize what he was seeing. He had to close his eyes and picture the image in reverse to understand it.

What he saw as gleaming silver was actually glistening black….

Terror poured out of the black images like a swarm of flies, a cluster of silvery whorls swarming into the room, released from the subject’s flesh. It didn’t matter that all these pictures had been taken years ago. Something was here at this instant, larger and more lasting than the atrocities of Democratic Kampuchea. Something filled the atmosphere until it strained at the bursting point. He was on the verge of seeing… what? What would he see when his eyes lost their focus on this world?

He tried to rise from the bed, but sickness overwhelmed him. He lay back and closed his eyes. He was aware of the light fading, the window going dark; the noises in the street—never loud to begin with, there being so few cars—surged and died. It occurred to him that he still had not seen the file he had come all this way to review. Nothing he’d done today made any sense. A lovely new cerebral encephalitis was on the rise in Cambodia, mosquito-borne; perhaps that explained everything. He could feel light pressing in at his eyes, almost painful, and realized that he was standing at the copier again, pressing a sheet to the glass, watching the bar of light travel slowly under his hands. It burned through his flesh like an X ray, searing the mandala into his head. This time it was silvery white, as in the negatives. Blinding….

When he awoke, the room was dark, but he could still see the pattern he had dreamed. It floated just above him, a bright silver disk. He saw one of his eyes reflected at its heart, as in a mirror.

He started to sit, but a hand pushed him back. The touch was familiar, as was the woman’s voice whispering in his ear. They had been here before. A shade knelt over him, pinning his legs. He couldn’t see much beyond the edges of the mirror, which radiated darkness into the room and obscured its other occupants. But he knew the mirror was held in the French boy’s hand; and he knew the German woman was beside him on the bed. The other time, he hadn’t known who they were; but now, having seen them in Tuol Sleng, he could finally put faces to their voices.

This lucidity lasted but a moment, then he felt the woman’s tongue in his ear and a hand groping at his crotch. Oblivion spread from these two points of contact. He withdrew from ordinary consciousness like a snake dragging out of its skin.

“Reveal yourself,” the woman said. They struggled in the dark.

But that was a dream too. He woke up alone except for a mosquito singing in his ear. The sheets were tangled around his legs, his pants were undone, and his testicles ached as if he had just spent himself in a wet dream. He rolled from the mattress and stumbled into the bathroom, running tepid water to splash in his face. He looked in the mirror for reassurance, but there was no mirror. Disoriented by fever and nightmares, he was remembering another bathroom in another country. He dried his face on a towel that reeked of mildew and developer, and went back to the bed.

His bag lay open on the floor.

The copies were gone. They had left him with nothing—nothing but the one sheet of tracing paper he’d copied by hand and folded into his notebook. He stared at the design. It was the same he had dreamed of seeing in the French boy’s mirror. Not dreamed, no; they had been here.

He had been robbed. Drugged, then robbed.

If so, then why did he feel relieved? Fulfilled?

He went into the dark narrow hall. The corridor looked longer than he remembered, and seemed to curve slightly, tapering until it deposited him at the top of the stairs. The clerk watched him descend into the dim, low-ceilinged lobby, smiling unconvincingly.

“Were there two people here to see me?”

The boy nodded. “Yes… your friends. They go up, come back just now. They say you sleeping.”

“My friends?”

“Yes, who come two nights ago.”

“What?”

“Same ones. I remember.”

At that moment the boy’s eyes fixed on the American’s forehead. He squinted, then went pale. The American wiped his brow, expecting to find a squashed insect there, something repellent, but there was nothing. He turned away from the desk and went out into the night, as if they might be lingering just outside.

The street, like the corridor upstairs, seemed to arch away from him, as if he had grown preternaturally aware of the curvature of the globe, as if he were about to slide away over the edge of everything. He was convinced now that these were the early stages of some illness new to him: dizziness, vertigo, and the slow steady throbbing of everything, as if a generator were pumping somewhere deep within the earth. In the intervals between waves of fever, everything looked uncannily clear. The light spilling out of bars and shops turned the garbage in the street into diamond replicas of itself. The babble and broken sounds of traffic merged into one voice breathing a harsh litany. The erratic motion of cyclos and pedestrians seemed elaborately choreographed. He felt as if he alone were capable of transcending the role written for him; the dance revolved on every side, but he had no part in it.

He spun around to see exactly how free he was and saw the desk clerk staring at him. The American moved what felt like an inch toward the street, extracting himself from the complex machinery of events. The boy’s eyes widened as if he had vanished completely, sidestepped the world. The rest of the scene darkened with a violet light that threatened to dissolve the edges of all objects. The buildings looked transparent but by no means unreal.

The American sensed something coming into the light of his piercing consciousness, an opacity swimming up beneath the insubstantial surfaces of everything he saw. For a moment he found himself hovering above the street, above the entire city. Phnom Penh rearranged itself into a wheel, the streets like spokes. He could see all the way to Tuol Sleng, could see two official cars pulling away from the entrance of the museum. They were practically the only two cars in the streets of Phnom Penh at that moment. One of the cars drove away; he could see the custodian’s body jouncing inside. The other headed straight toward him.

A grate clanged down over a shopfront, and his illusion of transcendence broke into a million disappointing pieces. He felt the world settle into place around him, coming down like the iron bars. He sunk to his knees, unsure where his body had been all the time he was hovering above it. He was not sure if what he had seen was the real Phnom Penh or a version that lay disguised within it, like a low flame that had blazed up wildly and then subsided again. The street was as it always had been, every shop different, every random speck of garbage uniquely meaningless. If there were a pattern here, it lay buried so deeply that he would never find it. He felt the night turning like a wheel, accelerating. Whatever wasn’t at the still center of that wheel would be flung violently away. He knew he was nowhere near the center. He must head inward, toward the source of all patterns. He must creep and cling to every surface, crawling like a millipede, or be cast off forever into the surrounding dark.

He threw himself to the ground, scuttling for shelter, oblivious to the Cambodian faces watching him in amazement, the mouths open in warning as he scurried into the street. That was how he came to be crushed beneath the tires of the only car on that long boulevard.