The Lost Goddess

44

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

Tyrone sat beside 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 old 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 mom. 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 on the other side of Jake. Chemda was 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.

Sovirom Sen narrated, gesturing languidly at the low-slung 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 ardor for communism has abated now they’ve all got BMWs. So they got a bit dubious.”

Jake swiveled 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 anymore, so 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 savior! 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 to 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 is a hard sell. So many have been scarred or lobotomized. Mutilated. Turned into monsters. So I knew I needed a truly positive payoff, 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 incredible new surgical technique.” A tiny, theatrical hesitation. “And then I had my epiphany. Of course! I suddenly thought of you, pal, old guilt-ridden, superstitious Jake Thurby. I saw that I could kill several birds with one prizewinning stone — if I made you the end of my story! I could finally save you from Sen and yourself — and at the same time 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, sitting in the sweet Himalayan sunshine — feeling cleansed and new. And that’s my perfect payoff that brings the story to life! You are my ending. My Pulitzer. I thank you.”

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 to 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 favorites, Jacob, my favorite 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 blow 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-centimeter-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.