The Lost Goddess

42

Tyrone nodded at Sen and turned to Jake.

“Two weeks ago Sen came to me in Phnom Penh and told me all of this, and he persuaded me that there was a solution to everyone’s problems.”

Jake was floundering and frightened. He gazed at Sen’s untroubled smile; he stammered.

“No — this — no—”

Tyrone tutted. “Hey. Shape up. You are missing one key piece of information. I’m surprised you haven’t asked the crucial question. The crucial part of the story is… Have a guess. Go on, just try.”

“What? What is it?” Jake could hear the needy tone in his own voice. He didn’t care. He was desperate. “Tyrone, just fucking tell me.”

“OK.” The American smiled. He was leaning sideways against the blank white wall, arms folded.

“The experiments were all Sen’s idea, it was his project. He conceived and directed the project. He and a couple of others, back in the seventies.”

The grandfather spoke. His bespoke shoes were truly incongruous in the utilitarian concrete room.

“Of course it was me. However, Jacob, it goes rhapsodically further than you have guessed. And here is why I have invited Tyrone into our… conspiration. It is a truly astonishing story, and Tyrone is a teller of stories. This is how I persuaded Mr. McKenna, by giving him the story — what we are really doing up here, in the wilds.”

“It’s crazy, Jake, a total mind-fuck, if you will forgive the expression.”

Helpless, Jake asked the only question: “What are you doing?”

Sen answered: “Recall, Jacob, how we discussed my loathing of irrationality, of superstition. Khmer legends, Chinese astrology, feng shui, geomancy. You remember our dialogue, Jacob? And remember how I affirmed the lucidity of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the nothingness. The taking away. The beautiful withered garden; the absence of God.”

“No,” said Jake, struggling with the concept, with the terror in his mind, the sense of something wicked approaching. “I still don’t get it.”

“So I will illuminate.” Sen came forward and tapped the end of Jake’s bed, almost paternally. “You deduced that we were trying to neurosection guilt and conscience, and that we failed. Well, in the years since then, the science has moved on.”

“How?”

“The original theory, Ghislaine Quoinelle’s elegant theory, was that the specifically human sense of guilt and remorse was the price we paid for our sudden leap forward in cognition, for the biological evolution in our neurology, changes that probably happened in the frontal cortex, the most advanced, recently evolved area of the brain. But during our conferences in Cambodia we deduced that the birth of guilt also meant the birth of religious faith, the birth of God. Because, when there is guilt, then God is not far behind. Only a god can punish or forgive — and therefore heal the guilt. Heal the species shame of Homo sapiens.”

His smile was polite, diplomatic.

“Since the 1980s your bold Western scientists have, not uncoincidentally, theorized that there may actually be a God module, a God spot, in the brain. A part of the brain responsible, as it were, for religious belief. People like Persinger in Canada, and Ramachandran, and Zohar, have specified areas of the cerebral cortex that are activated when we have religious experiences, epiphanies, conversions. Do you see the connections now? The brain, they say, is hard-wired for belief.”

He paused for effect.

“Of course I — and my friends in the Chinese elite, the Chinese military — we regarded the genesis of these theories with great interest. Because the speculations tie in so neatly with Ghislaine Quoinelles’s grand thesis, his ideas about the evolution of the human mind in the Paleolithic, the evolution of guilt and conscience in the cortex, in those…” Sen tapped the top of his forehead with a finger “… those younger neural pathways.”

Jake felt as if he were watching some speeded up film of a terrible organic process, a beautiful and terrible process. Narcosis, or decomposition.

“You’re saying—”

Tyrone intervened: “Jake, he’s saying that this is what they are actually doing. They have succeeded. They are doing it. They aren’t just spooning out guilt and conscience to make killers. They are going further: they are cutting out God, they are slicing the possibility of God out of the human mind.”

“Jesus. Jesus. A…”

“A Jesusectomy? A soulectomy. A stupidectomy!” Tyrone’s laugh was sharp. “Call it what you fucking will. But yes, that is what they are doing. And why not? How good is that? Get rid of it all, all the stupid fears of ghosts and demons and the bogeyman, all that praying and moaning and tambourine-bashing. Just cut it all out. That’s what they do.”

Sen stepped nearer to the bed once again.

“But we don’t just excise, Jake, we make people new, we manufacture them afresh, we make them perfect, and pure — and anatomically Marxist. Brains that are biologically incapable of belief. Minds that are immune to superstition.”

The room was silent for a second, until Tyrone snapped: “And guess what, dude?”

Jake shook his head.

Tyrone leaned near and put a hand on the ankle chain that locked Jake to the bed frame.

“You are going to see the results. We can prove it to you. It really works. It’s not the brutal intrusion you think, it works. It’s a miracle. It makes people better, smarter, happier. I’ve seen how it works, I’ve already met some of their successes, which is how Sen won me over.”

Jake gazed with pure and instantaneous hatred at Tyrone, and at Sen, and their chortling complicity. Of course. That’s why he was chained to the bed. In case he got murderously angry.

“You did it to Chemda. You always despised her superstitiousness. You hated that in her. You said it yourself—” He yearned to throttle the smiling patriarch. “So you cut it out? You fucking did it to Chemda! Your own granddaughter?”

Tyrone turned to Sen, who raised a consoling hand:

“So we have done the operation already. Why not? This is someone you love, someone very special. This means you will be able to… see for yourself the… transformation.”