Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

"Kerry," he said one day, "why is it that people are apathetic to mass murder and yet not to the murder of one person?"

"I don't know! I've been going crazy about that one ever since the Katanga massacre. Had it been an axe murder, it would be making front page news for weeks or months afterwards."

Gary looked so amused about it, rather pleased. "Yeah, we double-crossed Tshombe's faction and they were the ones who supported the United States. It wasn't even in our national self-interest to support the Congolese!"

As nationalistic as I was in my Ayn Rand days, that was hardly the traumatic message of women being hoisted on bamboo poles crammed into their vaginas, little boys and girls being burned alive in piles of wood by a United Nations police force.

I agreed with Brother-in-law's point also, though, as far as it went. It was alienating that no cruelty seemed to disturb him.

One day he compared himself to a character in Romain Gary's novel, The Roots of Heaven , the sociopathic gun-runner who was content to live in the world as it is and exploit its misery. "But perhaps there is some way we could work together," he added, after being kind enough to observe that I wasn't that way.

"Tell me, Kerry, would you be afraid to go to jail?"

"In a revolutionary situation," I said, "jail can be just another station house on the way to political power. That's something else a Romain Gary character says. I've read about Mahatma Gandhi's imprisonments and of how he made a yoga discipline of them, and I could also do that. Sometimes that's how I handled being in the Marine Corps."

"Kerry, there are some people called Scientologists who want to create a society based on human sacrifice. Did you realize that?"

"Slim has mentioned them. That's L. Ron Hubbard's new religion, isn't it? But he didn't say they were into human sacrifice."

"Well, they are. And it would be a good idea for you to keep that in mind. You might be in a position to keep them from taking over someday."

Then there was the time he talked at length about Frederick Demara, a Canadian con artist who had passed himself off as a doctor and performed successful brain surgery. "He sounds like a pretty smart man. Wouldn't you say so?"

I contributed to what seemed like an exchange of trivia at this point by saying: "They say that con men generally try to establish that there is some larceny in the hearts of their prospective victims before they bilk them."

Slim and Gary looked at me and nodded, a slight smile playing on Slim's lips, a twinkle in Brother-in-law's eyes, as if that were a much more relevant statement than I realized.

"Kerry. What do you think about the idea of building a secret society that uses the methods of Communism to fight Communism?"

We both expressed sympathy from time to time for the John Birch Society, though neither of us agreed completely with its politics. In those days, however, the mass media, particularly the Liberals, were misrepresenting the Birchers as para-military subversives. With encouragement from the White House, the media were attacking all extreme political positions. Rhetoric labeling intellectual minorities as dangerous, simply for being out of the "mainstream," regardless of their positions on violence, seemed itself both dangerous and irresponsible. That was one of the chief reasons I hated John F. Kennedy as much as I did: I valued dissent; he considered it unpatriotic.

"Kerry, you aren't the kind of person who is likely to give up and commit suicide in a difficult situation, are you?"

"You'll never meet anyone less inclined to suicide than me," I retorted. For at that age I had not thought much about my own thinking, riddled with contradictions as it was. I was attracted to every possible sort of dangerous adventure. Quite literally, I did not expect to be alive thirteen years in the future, when Brother-in-law's political timetable was supposed to activate his revolution. Yet nothing seemed sicker to me than deliberately taking sleeping pills, for example, a depressingly popular activity among Quarterites. As a good Objectivist, I despised with Ayn Rand all that was "anti-life."

Yet as an aspiring soldier of fortune and globe trotter, I felt only contempt for pedestrian and plodding individuals who did not agree with me that life was to be measured "not by its length, but by its intensity." How much you could cram into your lifespan was what counted, not how long you endured. To me the first only was living; simple contentment with nothing more than survival was merely existing. Secure in the feeling I was preaching to the converted, I explained my philosophy of life to Brother-in-law here very often.

"Kerry, how would you like to be placed in danger every day of your life?"

"Great! I'd love it!"

"I can arrange for that to happen, if that's what you want." A hint of warning colored his tone of voice.

"That's exactly what I want. Life means nothing except when it is seen in contrast to its background of oblivion. That's the message I got out of that Tennessee Williams play they made into a movie, the most recent one, Suddenly, Last Summer . Death is the face of God, the only God there is: absolute nothingness."

Slim said, "Kerry wants to live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. That isn't my philosophy, but I can understand how he feels."

"That's right."

Occasionally, I would share short-story or novel ideas with Slim and Brother-in-law. One of them was for a story called Apex: God of the North , about a great iceberg with a computer operations center concealed within it, secretly controlling all history from its submerged location close to the North Pole.

I was also contemplating a sequel titled AnaPex: God of the South . Gary seemed mildly entertained by these notions. At least he didn't dismiss them as unwelcome digressions.

And Slim was so interested in my writing projects that sometimes he would ask me for my notes when I was through with them, with the flattering words, "Someday you'll be a famous writer and they'll be worth something."

At times I even suspected Slim of swiping notes from me, although it was difficult to imagine a motive for going to that extreme. Since I tend to be absent-minded about my personal effects, I usually wound up depreciating the latter suspicion as routine paranoia.

Among notes that vanished mysteriously about the time of one of Slim's visits were some about an idea I had been playing with since my Marine Corps days, for building a secret society of assassins to kill foreign dictators.

They featured a diagram shaped like a Maltese cross. At the center was the leader, who would then appoint one assistant in each of four areas: administration, intelligence, operations and logistics, the organizational divisions of Marine Corps activity.

Each assistant would then appoint followers whose identity would remain unknown to the leader, as would his to them. Every follower was to recruit two more followers and so on, in descending levels of authority, creating four pyramidal wings.

In the service I had once gone so far as to appoint another Marine, Raul Gayon, my chief of intelligence. Shortly thereafter, though, we quarreled and stopped speaking to one another.

I remember clearly that my suddenly missing notes were in pencil. I don't recall how thoroughly they explained the diagram. I think they were probably rather scant, with just enough information to convey the general notion and no more.

Vanishing at about the same time were jottings about a publishing business I was thinking of establishing, called Thor Thunderpress. Slim had said Thor was the Norse god of thunder; his name consisted of the first four letters of my last name. I don't believe he further mentioned to me that the symbol of Thor's hammer was the swastika, nor that Hitler took that insignia from the Finnish Air Force. In fact, I think Brother-in-law told me the swastika was favored by Hitler because it was the symbol used by the Aryans in conquering pre-Vedic India.