The Lost Goddess

48

He lay back on the neurosurgeon’s table, which was more like a tilted throne. Bright lights shone down on his scalp, while a silent nurse sorted through a cutlery of steel tools. The nurse was the only other staff member who hadn’t fled. What pitiable fact had kept her loyal to the end?

“I will have to do the anesthesia myself,” said Fishwick, from the far side of the room. He offered Jake a melancholy smile. “Don’t worry, I do know what I am doing. It’s the surgery that is problematic. Potentially.”

Jake stiffened with anxiety. He gazed around the empty, white, laboratory-like chamber. Chemda wasn’t present; she had told him she couldn’t bear to watch. Jake wondered if he could blame her for this.

“How long will I be under?”

“Two hours. We need to work fast.”

Two hours, Jake thought. Just two hours. And then what? The terrors were gathering at the door of his future. Would he wake, and, if he woke up, would he still have a mind? Did he even want the guilt to return?

The silence in the room, while Fishwick washed his hands at a metal sink, was unbearable.

“Talk to me,” Jake said. “Please. Talk to me.”

“Of course.”

“Just talk. Tell me what are you going to do, after all this?”

Fishwick sighed.

“I would maybe like to make some repayment… for what I have done. Perhaps I could work in Chinese hospitals, treating epilepsy with neurosurgery. The procedure is, er, similar. Religious visions and spiritual epiphanies closely mirror the neural process of epileptic seizures.”

Staring into the bright white light of the surgery lamps, Jake absorbed this thought.

“So you think religion is just a kind of epilepsy?”

Fishwick gazed at the paper towel in his hands.

“Well… as I implied, before, over many years, I developed doubts about the whole concept.”

“Doubts. And?”

“I was once, as you know, a devoted Marxist. But as I investigated the links between Marxism and social structure and religion, it struck me that…” Fishwick allowed the nurse to snap some rubber gloves on his wrists. Then he continued: “It struck me that the worst societies are nearly always the atheist societies. Hitler’s Germany. Mao’s China. Stalin’s Russia. And the Khmer Rouge, of course, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the most brutal of all, the most violently atheist. The land of the prophecy, hmm? The land without religion. And so much blood.”

“So…?”

“In just a hundred years atheist Communists and atheist Nazis killed hundreds of millions… comprehensively more than any religion. And yet they did it for ideological and philosophical reasons, they did it for reasons which were themselves quasi-religious.”

“And what does that mean?”

The tools of Fishwick’s business twinkled in the overbright lights; the stainless silver scalpels, the exquisite cranial drills.

“This is the real reason that they are going to close down the lab, Jake, why even the hard-core Communist Chinese lost interest in Sen’s work. It turned out that the people who had the surgery, the Godectomy, here, they ended up with as little interest in communism as they might have had in Islam… or Zoroastrianism.”

“Why?”

“Because communism is just another belief system. Hmm? Another irrational belief system that uses the same neural structures. Communism relies on faith and devotion and revelation, it has sacred texts—Das Kapital, the Little Red Book — it has saints, prophets, and priests. It believes in a heaven, a Utopia, which is just a heaven on earth in their case. And Marxism is just as illogical as the craziest faith: everywhere that communism has been tried it has failed, dismally.” The neurosurgeon leaned to check an oval glass dial on one squat and glinting machine. “Yet still the true believers believe, they are sure we shall see heaven on earth. They have, after all, faith.”

“Except an even more destructive one,” Jake said. “A savage and godless faith. Right?”

“Yes. A religion with no morals, quite lethal and disgusting. Leaving millions killed. If communism is their Koran, if Marx is their Bible — then it is a Bible of the Dead.” He paused for a long second. “And many of our patients were proof of this equivalence: following the operation, it turned out they were all deeply skeptical of communism, just as skeptical of communism as they might be of Mormonism, or horoscopes. And when the Chinese realized that Sen’s laboratory was churning out people with no faith in the orthodox stupidities of Marx and Mao, that’s when they lost interest.”

Jake was sweating now. Hot and sweating.

“Ironic.”

Fishwick agreed, with a pensive smile. And stood close.

“We’re nearly ready. Jake… the temperature levels of the thawing process are vitally important. There’s just a few moments to go….” A quiet word was swapped with the nurse.

Jake said, “Keep talking. Before I change my mind. Please?”

Fishwick obeyed. “As it happens, Cambodia also provides the most interesting counterexample, on which I have often reflected. Indeed, a year or two ago I began to vigorously reexamine all the ancient history. For instance, I went back to Site Nine in Laos — they preserved just one site intact for researchers. And, crucially, I also visited Angkor.” He was staring into his own surgical lights. “Ah, Angkor Wat. Perhaps the greatest and most beautiful preindustrial society we know: exquisitely advanced, enchanted, a kingdom where government was truly united with the image of the divine, of the godhead—”

“The faces of the Bayon.”

“Yes.” The American tilted one of the vast surgical lights a fraction of a centimeter. “You know, the builders of Angkor even left a sign to show that they knew the importance of proper faith to civilization.”

“The diamond in the forehead of the great Bayon faces.”

The light was shining on Jake’s forehead. Fishwick answered:

“Yes. Perhaps instinctively, the builders of Angkor knew the preciousness of true religion. They even guessed where it might lie, the God module, in the head. They certainly remembered the terrors of the Black Khmer, trepanned, lobotomized, and godless… on the Plain of Jars.” There was another murmured conversation with the nurse. The surgeon swiveled, and explained: “Jake, this is it. In approximately ninety seconds, the cryoprobe will be at the correct temperature. So if you want to turn back, you need to speak up now.”

Jake’s heartbeat was chaotic: skipping with fear. He quelled his terror with another question.

“No. I want to know why you carried on with the surgeries, if you had these doubts.”

Fishwick nodded, his face a shadow behind the lights.

“Because I kept convincing myself… against the growing evidence. After all, there are so many good, solid, Darwinian explanations for why religious faith has evolved. And yet I also had evidence of the necessity of faith. People who have faith are healthier, happier, they live longer, they even have stronger immune systems. This is scientific fact. So I became… very confused.” The nurse was calling Fishwick to scrutinize a larger machine, which resembled an ECG monitor. The surgeon softly spoke to the nurse and returned to his theme. “Then, one day, quite recently, I discovered another very curious fact during my research. It’s Parkinson’s disease. People who have Parkinson’s, even the mildest form… are less likely to be believers.”

The nurse was standing with the rubber mask, ready to hand it over.

“And that means?” Jake grasped at the last shreds of this reality. “What does that mean?”

“It is therefore at least arguable that atheism is a form of dementia. Imagine that! Atheism is a kind of psychosis, a mental illness. The healthy mind is, very, very truly, a mind that believes.” An electronic chime rang across the room. “OK, Jake, that’s the signal. The temperature is critical, we need to do this… right now. We can’t wait any longer.”

“Wait, I want to know.” Even as the rubber mask of anesthesia was clamped over his mouth, Jake felt the cry of a question in his godless mind. “I still don’t know why. Why does it make us happier? Why are we meant to believe?”

But his question was met by the black silence of unconsciousness.