Tom Knox - Bible of the Dead

And now he turned to Julia. She had been silent all through this; but she responded to his gaze. Lifting her phone, she said:

‘I can get us out of here. I’ve been in touch with Rouvier. When we reached Bala, there was finally a signal. I spoke to him several times. He has been working for us; he’s spoken to his superiors – who have spoken to European governments, he thinks the Chinese government probably want this over, hushed up. They might do a deal. Just expel us.’ She shook her head. ‘But the army are coming. So if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen soon. You really don’t have much time. You need to decide.’

Jake’s gaze, rested, finally, on Chemda. The face he could no longer love.

He lay back on the neurosurgeon’s table, which was more like a tilted throne. Bright lights shone down on his scalp, a silent nurse sorted through a cutlery of steel tools. The nurse was the only other staff member who hadn’t fled.

‘I will have to do the anaesthesia 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. Was he going to wake up? 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 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 hardcore 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, hm? 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 hardcore 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. Hm? 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, it’s 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. So it’s just another religion.’

‘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 sceptical of communism, just as sceptical 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 counter example, on which I have often reflected. Indeed, a year or two ago I began to vigorously re-examine all the ancient history. For instance, I went back to Jar Site 9 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 pre-industrial 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 centimetre. ‘You know, the builders of Angkor even left a sign, to show that they knew this 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 swivelled, and explained: ‘Jake, this is it. In approxim ately ninety seconds, the cryoprobe will be 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.’