The Lost Goddess

21

Ponlok pressed the knife cruelly to Chemda’s pulsing neck. She was screaming and writhing, but if she writhed any harder she would slash her own throat. The blood would geyser. Her legs were being slowly forced open.

Jake had a fraction of a second to decide.

He stepped back as if turning away, then swiveled in an instant and ran two steps and flashed out a boot, as hard as he could manage. At school he’d learned to do the drop kick fast, very fast, invisibly fast. Before he got crushed in the rugby maul.

It worked. A sickeningly direct hit. The thudding sound of his steel-capped boot hitting Ponlok’s head was queasy and cracking; but his kick did the task. The janitor went sprawling into the grit of the rancid laboratory. The knife spun silver in the sunlight, twirling into shadows.

Ponlok gave a low and ugly moan. The Khmer man was prone, bleeding, half conscious. Jake grabbed Chemda’s hands and helped her to her feet and she said:

“Aw kohn, quick!”

He didn’t need thank-yous; he understood quick; hand in hand they skeltered down the alley, down the next alley, up the fire escape past the jackfruit trees and into the apartment. Two minutes. Chemda bandaged his head with some torn up cotton T-shirt; he wiped himself down in the bathroom, then stuffed his few items into a bag. Chemda was in the living room, calling someone on a phone, rattling questions in Khmer. Then she looked Jake’s way. “Now!” As one, they sprinted down the steps to the yard and then the boulevard; they were two pitiable fugitives with a couple of bags standing alongside the national drag race of Highway 6—where anyone and everyone could drive by and see them — but then a black-and-white old Citroën taxi squealed to the curb and the driver grinned his six teeth.

Chemda jumped in and said, “Siem Reap.”

The man lifted a hand as if to say whoah — Siem Reap?

Jake knew this was a long way — two hundred kilometers north, into the jungle, close to Angkor. A day’s drive. Yet the taxi driver’s skeptical eyes narrowed into shrewd acceptance when he saw Chemda flourish a clutch of dollars from her bag: tens, twenties, hundreds.

“Siem Reap, baat!”

The taxi dodged through the traffic, which was thinning anyway as they swiftly exited the brash periphery of the city.

Sweating and trembling, Jake checked behind them. Nothing. Nothing but traffic. They passed Caltex stations, Happy Cellphone shops, grungy garages, then more Caltex stations, more Happy Cellphone outlets, more tire shops; it was like the backdrop to a cheap cartoon repeating itself. Then they passed an old French shop with dépôt de pharmacie on the side, then a Sukisoup outlet, a patch of wasteland, and the skeletal bamboo scaffolding of a half-finished apartment block — and then, at last, the water buffalo and the paddies and the sugar palms inclining their heads, like chancellors bowing to a despotic lord.

The royal sun.

They had made it out of the city. They were in rural Cambodia, the land of two seasons and two harvests and two million dead, the land of the killing fields.

“The money is my mom’s,” said Chemda. “I just took it.”

Jake shrugged and didn’t reply. He wasn’t even sure if he cared, or if he was meant to reply. If he answered her, that meant a dialogue, and a dialogue meant conversation, and a conversation meant they might have to talk about what had just happened: Chemda had nearly been raped by an old man. An old man who had been, what, altered? An old man who had endured the same terrors as Chemda’s grandmother, and who else?

It was too much. The grief in Chemda’s life was mounting like the pyramids of bashed in skulls at Cheung Ek. And this was just Chemda’s family. There were a million more Khmer families in Cambodia, out there, each one with their little pyramid of skulls. No wonder there were so many neak ta: so many cages for the unquiet dead.

“Remember what Ponlok said? I was wondering… if anyone else was experimented on. So many of my cousins did not survive.”

Her eyes were staring ahead, lustrous, in profile. They were roaring through a little village, where women loosely turbaned by the elegant Khmer scarves — the striped or chequerboard cotton krama, used as slings or turbans or baby carriers or lunch packs or ponchos — looked up at the car. The women frowned under their kramas. Children played in the dust, quite naked.

They were going too fast. Jake didn’t care, he wanted to go fast. Faster than the police. Faster than light. Faster than life. He was hot and dehydrated. Again. And he couldn’t keep saying nothing.

“Look at it this way. Do you remember anyone in your family being aggressive? Demented? Like the janitor?”

“Why?”

“Because, Chemda—” he hesitated, and his gaze failed to meet hers “—because I reckon I have an idea why Ponlok did what he did. ’Cause he wrote those notes. Just before he attacked you.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘They make me like this.’ He was trying to warn us before he did it.”

“How long before?”

“Moments. Just seconds.”

“So he knew what he was going to do? Attack me?” She exhaled. “And he tried to warn you and yet—” Her face whitened with understanding. “He is aware of the problem but he just couldn’t help himself. An uncontrollable urge.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Her demeanor was strained, like she was forcing herself to use a matter of fact voice, even though her lips were trembling. “But how could this brain surgery they did, or whatever it was, how could that have such an effect?”

“Well. I think I have an idea, maybe. Just maybe.”

“OK.”

“What I mean is — I did a bit of research on primitive surgery when we got back from Chiang Rai. I read about holes in the head, like the trepanations we saw in—”

“Trepanations?”

“It means holes drilled in the skull.”

“OK. Hnh. And?”

Jake stared through the grimy cab window. The forests out there were thicker now. Mahogany, rosewood, sugar palm. The banyan of the Buddha. They were driving deep into the soul of the country: Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, the emotional heartland of the Khmer.

He gave his answer.

“I’m obviously not any kind of expert, but it seems, maybe, the frontal lobes of the brain are associated with self-control, commanding the baser emotions; so maybe if you cut out some of the frontal cortex, you excise the most evolved part of the brain. Therefore, just possibly, it could make you amoral and criminal. Cruel. Predatory. Violent.”

“A rapist.”

Jake was silent. Then he said, “Yes. Why not?”

Chemda spoke quietly: “The skulls on the Plain of Jars. The same. They were the same, Jake.”

“I know… exactly the same wounds.” Jake’s eyes focused on the dust smearing the car window. He was thinking intensely. “There is — or there must be — a connection. But I can’t work it out. Two thousand years ago, then suddenly again. The violence…” He gazed her way. “Ponlok. Jesus, Chem, are you OK?”

Her hand reached for his across the torn vinyl of the taxi’s backseat. She said to him, with softness: “Yes. I’m OK. Ah. I just…” She closed her dark eyes, then opened them once more. “Thank you for doing that, back there. We saved each other. We are the same. You lost your sister and I lost my grandmother… and God knows who else.” Her kissing lips were a warming whisper on his cheek, momentary and elusive, then she sat back. “We are the same.”

Jake yearned to believe this, yet he also wondered, helplessly, if this were really true. Some of him still resisted the equation. Were they the same? Were they definitely and entirely on the same side? Even as he was falling for her, some element inside him still didn’t or couldn’t wholly trust her. And yet he didn’t know why. He thought of the black-toothed spider witch. Her muttering and curses, her kitsch pullover with the sequined turquoise heart. Kali, the Eater of Men.

Chemda said, “Could that be why they did it, the Khmer Rouge? These, ah, horrible experiments, to actually make some kind of behavioral change? Make people more violent and cruel? Like beasts?”

“Maybe.” Jake had already been thinking on these lines. “But why would anyone volunteer for this? Like your grandmother?”

Chemda exhaled. “That’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Why volunteer for that? It simply doesn’t make any sense. But we could ask my uncle, he might know.”

“Your uncle?”

“My father’s brother. Tek Sonisoy. He works in Siem Reap. He’s a scientist. Conservation. That’s where we’re going.”

“But—”

She lifted a dark yet somehow pale hand and put a finger vertical to his lips.

“He renounced my family years ago. The wealth and the power and the politics. Resents my grandfather, dislikes my mother, hates all that political stuff. He grew up in California with me, but then he went traveling, disowned my family; ah, he backpacked. And then he ended up in Cambodia. He was a real monk for a while, now he works discreetly at Angkor. We get along. He has helped me before, kind of, when I was researching the Plain of Jars. We’ve been e-mailing, though I haven’t told him everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t want to load this on him; he hates all this. He’s spent his life escaping the past. The recent past. But now we have no choice. I trust him… implicitly. He can shelter us. I’m sure he will.”

“But won’t your grandfather know where we are?”

“He might guess, eventually. I wonder if my grandfather even knows that Sonisoy is in the country. He certainly won’t know his precise location in Siem. Why would he?”

Jake sat back. He gazed down at his empty hands. Suddenly and acutely, he felt the lack of his cameras. Lost in the fire. Without them, what could he do, how could he handle it all? How could he mediate and understand the world? Without his cameras, what was he? Jake Thurby, photographer? Not anymore. Just a man running, with a girl.

“Chemda, we can’t stay in Siem for long. A few hours. We need to find a way to get to Thailand.”

“OK, but we can work it out at Sonisoy’s place. Ah, please. I need to… rest. Just one night?”

Just one night. The phrase was simple. But what it embodied was not: their continued flight, away from the horror and further risk and danger. But Jake also saw no other obvious escape route. And Siem Reap was on the way to Thailand. And Thailand would be safe. Wouldn’t it?

Rich, developed, comparatively sensible Thailand.

Crossing the frontier would be dicey, but they’d done it before in Laos, and once they were in Thailand he could draw breath — and then at last give vent to his despairing anguish at the trail of violence they had left behind. And yes, he understood why Chemda needed to rest. The ghastly image of the cratered man, the altered man, groping inside her thighs, trying to rape her: that still hurt, like the cut on his head still hurt, under the haphazard bandage Chemda had applied at the apartment.

It was just a flesh wound, but it stung. Jake touched his scalp, then he winced, and sweated, and gazed at the sunlight, serrated by the palm fronds.

Two hours later, as the twilight finally relieved the countryside from the torment of the sun — like a good cop taking over from a bad cop — they arrived in Siem Reap.

Jake had been here, briefly, once before. A sweet little Indochinese town, not unlike Luang Prabang, full of hotels and spas and moonlit walks and klongs and night markets, all dedicated to watering and sheltering the millions of tourists who flooded the nearby sites: the clearings of Angkor Wat, where the great temples and palaces of Jayavarman and Suryavarman moldered nobly in the rasping jungle.

But they were not here for sightseeing. They parked by the biggest night market, already busy with stalls selling obese wooden Buddhas and antique incense burners and pirated DVDs of Thai horror movies. Jake glanced at one image as they passed: it was a DVD called Demonic Beauty, and the label showed the disembodied head of a woman with her spinal cord and lungs trailing from her severed head like a grisly bridal train of viscera. He turned away.

Sonisoy was waiting for them at a doorway. He looked like Chemda, in male guise. Taller, handsome, older, with the shaved bald head of the monk he once was. He seemed intensely Khmer, but spoke flawless American-accented English.

Hands were shaken. Jake’s hands were shaking anyway. Sonisoy escorted them into a house just around the corner from the night market, a house of wood and sweet smells of incense and paper Chinese lanterns, with photos of the Temple of Ta Prohm on the wall.

He served them red Khmer tea as he listened to Chemda tell their story, in one gushing monologue. His face was sober and his head was shaved and his demeanor was monastic. He nodded.

Then he handed out some Khmer sweetmeats: nom krob khnor, a translucent blob of gelatin with a yellow mung bean in the middle, like a sweetened little embryo in a placenta. Jake wanted to be sick. He wanted to be at home in England. He could see the blank milky eyes of the smoke babies, the horrible pulsing scar of the janitor; he could see blood and death, the blank eyes of his sister and the disembodied smile of his mother and…

He snapped out of it. Turned the wheel of his mind. He had gone off-road, for a moment, he had veered into the bush, where the minefields lurked, the UXO of the past.

The room was quiet. Chemda had finished her story. Sonisoy put down his cup of red tea and, with the nocturnal murmur of Siem Reap just audible beyond the shutters, said:

“Of course, I understand, I believe I have some more information that may piece it all together.”

“What?” said Chemda. “How?”

“I think…” Sonisoy sighed. “I believe, from what you have told me, that I know who else was a victim of these experiments. Another member of the family. Close, Chemda. Very close.”

Chemda said nothing. She stared into the gloom, at the scraped, shaven head of her uncle, now just a silhouette in the candled dark. She had a hand to her mouth; her eyes were shining in the candlelight, moist with incipient tears. She already knew.

“My father? As well?”

“Your father, little Chemtik.” His smile was very sad. “My brother. Think about it, about the way he died.”

The room was morbid with silence. The plate of mung beans, wrapped in their translucent cocoons of jelly, glistened in the candlelight.