Helen flicked the ash from her cigarette and smiled. It was the same clinical smile she had smiled on the terrace that time, just after she had finished her gymnastics routine and turned to Carl and he realized for the first time that he was in love with her.
“Believe me, I prayed every day, heaven, I prayed, please let him be as dimwitted as he looks. Nobody expected that. Three times,” she held up three tautological fingers, “I was ordered three times to cut things short and break out the gray case. It took every ounce of effort to hold that off, three times. He’ll lead us there, I said.”
Carl jerked at the ropes. He felt a snap and crunch in his right hand and closed his eyes.
“And if you think that this is it, if you think we’ll just leave it after a bit of talk and psychology and a couple of paltry zaps of electricity… do you think that? Do you think this is some kind of cute little play with a cave and a harmless electrical device and a blonde out of a cigarette advertisement working you over a little verbally? I promise you, that is not the case. I’m going to ask you a few more questions. And you can act coy like some kind of silver-screen diva. It’s up to you. But then—”
With a cry of pain, Carl yanked his shoulder up. And his hand was free.
61
A Little Stochastic
What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection?
AUGUSTINE
THE SMOKE HAD CLOUDED the air like milk-glass. Helen leaned her upper body back. “What’s this?” she asked, coughing briefly. “We’ll tie that back up.”
She tied the hand down again and then had Carl tell the whole story over again from the beginning. Everything she already knew. And everything that he, aided by the electric shocks, had told Cockcroft, the Syrian and the bassist. Every detail. When he was finished, she said: “And now the whole thing again, backwards, point by point.”
“Have you fallen under the spell of the psychologists?”
“From the moment you met the prostitute to the moment I left you alone in front of the commune.”
“If you still don’t know whether I have amnesia—”
“You don’t. Now start talking.”
“Then why are you testing my memory?”
“I’m not testing it. Start.”
Carl furrowed his brow, and after a while Helen said: “I already told you, you’re not the brightest bulb. This is not how you test for amnesia. This is how you test for poorly constructed lies. So. Your prostitute.”
He stared at Helen. He looked at her knees, he looked at his own knees, and then he looked her in the eyes again.
She nodded to the switch in her lap, and Carl told the whole story backwards. The prostitute who called him Cetrois, the morphine, the walk through the port. Before that the Salt Quarter, which was actually the Empty Quarter. The little café. The school children in front of the café and the stolen yellow blazer. The telephone booth. The waiter with the overcooked soup. Before that the desert, the old fellah, the corpse with the wire around its throat. The question of the moped and the paper scraps in his pocket. Running away, the men in white djellabas following him. Tindirma. The riot. The fire in the commune, set off by the animal the size of a truck. Carl talked about the mass panic and the spot where he had watched it all, he talked about the shabby hotel and (in all detail) about the respectable woman in the hotel. About the green soda can and the yellow Mercedes and the things inside it. The ball, the pen and the pad of paper with “CETROIS” on it. And at the very end, the note he left for Helen on the passenger seat of the pickup.
Helen listened to it all, and when he was finished and looked up like a fifth grader after an oral exam, she wanted to hear it again, forward. And then again, backwards. The fact that she didn’t raise her voice or make use of the black case gave Carl a glimmer of hope. It seemed he might be believed if only he could just string together the details in the same order, or the other way around.
The only comment Helen made was a sneering grin at the point with the happy school children, and the more times he used that adjective, the more strange and unlikely it seemed even to himself that he would just lose the blazer together with the cartridges inside it. He no longer doubted the fact that this was all about those cartridges. He began to include explanatory words in his sentences, and as he was describing in vain for the fifth or sixth time running after the yellow blazer, he added a detail he had left out up to then: the ouz. How it had suddenly appeared on top of the dune at dusk and bitten him, with the paper crown on its head, and how he had nearly lost the cartridges right then, in the sand, in the most ridiculous circumstances possible… as if the unlikeliness of this event might explain the unlikely subsequent loss. A mathematical law, a cosmic fluke. He begged her to look at the bite wound on his wrist, and Helen stood up and walked around Carl’s chair with her hands folded behind her neck.
“Who trained you?” she asked barely audibly when she was behind him, and “Is that all you want to tell me?” once she was seated again on the wooden box. “National pride, idealism, religious dogma, whatever other baubles and tinsel the intellectually unenlightened decorate their world view with and make it so empirically difficult for adults to cast off—I don’t know what motivates you. But you should think it over. When I said I was going to ask you these questions once, I really meant it. And when I said it was a trifle, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to us. It is very important.”
“More important than a human life?” Carl mustered the energy to ask.
“Are you talking about yours? Nothing is more important than a human life.” Helen ran her index finger down Carl’s stained sweater. “Even when it is the life of a liar. Or the life of a smuggler. An idiot and a career criminal. Every life is priceless, unique and worth preserving. Says the lawyer. The problem is, we’re not lawyers. We are not of the opinion that a life can’t be weighed against other goods or other lives. We’re more like the statisticians, and the statistics say: there is perhaps a one percent chance that things are the way you say they are. That you don’t know who you are. That you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, multiple times. School children, corpses in the desert with wire around their necks and IDs in their pocket and all the rest. It could all be true. But there is a ninety-nine percent chance that’s not the case. That it’s all bullshit. That a man reached his hand out for something that didn’t belong to him. And that he didn’t lose it, but rather passed it on. Or hid it. Ninety-nine percent. Ninety-nine percent chance that we are protecting world peace. Ninety-nine percent chance that our little investigation will serve to maintain a peaceful cohabitation without nuclear weapons. Ninety-nine percent chance it’s for the survival of Israel, for happy children, grazing cows and all that other shit. Ninety-nine percent chance that this isn’t about one human life but about millions of them. Ninety-nine percent for enlightenment and humanism and one percent that our shameful interrogation is an example of a return to the Middle Ages. Honestly,” said Helen, lifting his chin gently with two fingers and looking him in the eyes. “A hundred to one. Or a million to one. How should we proceed? What do you think? I can give you a tip. The statisticians traditionally operate dispassionately.”
“You know me. You’ve spent time with me.”
“You don’t even know yourself. So you say.”
“But why should I have told you all that I told you?”
“Because you’re stupid?” said Helen. “Because to the very end you had no idea whose car you had got into? Because you thought the blonde, gum-chewing woman would continue to help you? We don’t even know if these cartridges exist. Or in what form—”
“You know,” said Carl. “You know that I don’t know anything.”
“I’ll know when we’re finished here. When we are finished here and have tried out all our pretty machines, then I will know. Then I will believe you and apologize—which has a one percent chance of happening. But you can bel
ieve me: when we are finished here, you will have said everything you know. Because I’m afraid we’re the good guys here. And you are not. Whether you realize it or not. But you’ve got yourself into it, and you have something that belongs to us. That we discovered. Our scientists. And that’s why we are the good guys: we built the bomb and wreaked havoc with it. But we learned from that. We’re the adaptive system. Hiroshima shortened the war, and you can argue about Nagasaki—but it’s not going to happen a third time. We will stop it from happening a third time. In our hands the bomb is nothing more than an ethical principle. Put the same bomb in your hands and we’d be heading toward catastrophe that would make everything else look like nothing more than a minor headache by comparison. And why am I telling you all of this? I’m not saying it because I think I can convince you. If you were susceptible to rational argumentation you wouldn’t be here now. I’m telling you because I want you to know where we stand.”
She opened the top button of her blouse, wiped sweat from her collarbone with two fingers, then lit another cigarette.
62
The Deepest Hole
They came to the river of pus and the river of blood, intended as traps by the dark lords. But the brothers caused their blowguns to swell as they had the madre de cacao tree and simply floated across without a care.
POPOL VUH
THE GOAT HAD DISAPPEARED; the loose end of the chain lay on the bank. The shadows of the rock formations that Carl still had in his head swayed in the light. The Syrian, with his pant legs rolled up, dragged him into the middle of the sludgy pool. He fished out the chain and bound it around his neck with a lock. “It’s too long,” said someone, and the Syrian pushed Carl’s face down until it was nearly touching the water, then opened the lock and wrapped the chain around again. Cockcroft, Helen, the bassist and the carbide lamp looked out from the bank. They encouraged him to talk. He remained silent.
Cockcroft squatted down, looked into Carl’s eyes for a long time and said: “No idea is so great that it’s worth dying for. We’ve been open with you up to now, and I’m going to be open right now, too. Existential despair is the goal of our methods. To put you into a state of existential despair. There are varying theories about it. Until recently the assumption named after Hanns Scharff generally held sway, namely that too much despair is counterproductive to eliciting the truth and causes people to make things up. But that’s no longer agreed upon, and as far as we’re concerned it’s toast. Still others, and I’m talking about people worthy of being taken seriously, suggest on the other hand that the obdurate, and in particular the anal-retentive, become more obdurate and in the end utterly shut down when subjected to an excess of despair. But this, too, has been disproved. Current theory holds that deep existential despair is the gold standard…” And on and on.
Carl had long since stopped following it. It was all just blather, the one hundredth showing of the tools. He felt his way down the chain, which was secured to an iron rod attached to a rock deep down in the mud. He closed his eyes.
“See you tomorrow,” someone said. Helen. And that was apparently the closing statement. Because the light wobbled away together with voices and footsteps, and Carl remained there alone in the dark. He sought a stable position, shifting around in the knee-deep water. The length of the chain between the surface of the water and his neck was barely fifteen centimeters. It was so short that he couldn’t prop himself up on outstretched arms, and if he tried to rest on his elbows the water came up to his chin. He tried to stay calm. He screamed.
He propped himself up on his left side until the muscles cramped, then he propped himself up on his right side until the muscles cramped. Then he rocked from side to side until he was sapped of all strength. Which happened quickly, and he realized he wouldn’t be able to hold out for even an hour. But after an hour he was still alive and rocking back and forth.
At first he was able to brace himself on each elbow for five or even ten minutes at a time, but the intervals quickly shrank. Like a person carrying a heavy suitcase through town, switching it from hand to hand until finally unable to hold it in either one. He tried to lean his shoulder against the iron rod, he tried to mound mud into a pillow. His stomach muscles gave out, his back muscles gave out, and when he realized where this was leading he tried to drown himself. He rolled onto his back into the warm, gurgling silence. The mud. The held breath. The obsidian above his closed eyelids. He saw the desert. He saw a yellow cloud. He saw a green flag. A gulp of the disgusting-smelling broth splashed into his mouth and he shot back up again spitting and choking. He yanked on the chain. He pulled on the iron rod. Left side, right side. Submerged. As with every monotonous, stressful activity, he didn’t concentrate on what he was doing but how he did it. He began to lecture himself and couldn’t suppress the thought that he was standing at a lectern in front of hundreds of students giving a speech about surviving in muddy pits if fate (or its human representative) staked you unforgivingly in such a spot.
This is the manner in which you prop yourself up, he said, and not this way. The joints A, B and C need to be in such-and-such an angle in order to minimize fatigue and thereby maximize endurance. Thereafter in logarithmical, abbreviated intervals will follow cradling and rocking, which in turn will be followed again by the modified technique of propping oneself up… and so on and so forth. Even the most recalcitrant student had opened his notebook by this point and was taking notes. It was a little like being in an orchid garden of physiology, but the professor’s lectures about the ideal bracing positions were so captivating that even his colleagues dropped in to hear them. The length of the lectures was unusual as well. They went on for hours and days, weeks and months and many semesters, and always sitting in the back row sat a gum-chewing blonde with large breasts and a strange facial expression.
In one of his moments of clarity Carl was coming to terms with his own death when for the first time, inspired by this line of thinking, he thought he might not be alone in the dark. They knew—surely they knew—that a person in his circumstance would quickly drown and take his knowledge with him. So there must be someone there observing him, eavesdropping and holding a protective hand over him. One of the four of them. Carl had heard their voices and footsteps fade away, he had seen the light die, but he had not paid attention to whether it had actually been the footsteps of four people leaving.
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