“I’m hanging on by a thread, now,” I said.
Malthusian did not acknowledge my joke, but closed his eyes momentarily and pressed on as if it would all soon become clear.
“Whereas Jaynes gives many explanations for the growing faintness of the voice of God—genocide, natural upheavals, parental selection, environmental demands requiring the wonderful plasticity of the human brain to enact these changes—my fellow researchers and I believed that the muting of the voice was a result of the rapid shrinking of the anterior commissure to its present state of no more than one-eighth of an inch across. This, we believed, was the physiological change that fractured the group mind into individual consciousness. ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ You see? There is much more, but that is the crux.”
“The survival of human beings depended upon this change?” I asked.
“The complexity of civilization required diversification.”
“Interesting,” was all I could manage.
“As I said,” Malthusian went on, “very few took Jaynes seriously, but I did. His ideas were revolutionary, but they were not unfounded.” Here, he took a cigarette from the silver case and lit it.
“Is that smart,” I asked, nodding at the cigarette, “considering your health?”
“I have been conditioned by Philip Morris,” he said with a smile.
“This theory is only the beginning, I can tell,” I said.
“Very good, professor,” he whispered. “As Farid ud-Din Attar might have written—if this tale I am about to tell you were inscribed with needles upon the corner of the eye, it would still serve as a lesson to the circumspect.”
He lifted the bottle of wine and poured me another glass. “To begin with, if you tell anyone what I am about to tell you, you will be putting your family and yourself in great jeopardy. Understood?”
I thought momentarily of Malthusian’s photos with all those military personnel and his telling me that he had been employed by one of the more shadowed entities of the government. A grim silence filled the room as those huge eyes of his focused on mine. I thought of leaving, but instead I slowly nodded.
“I was part of a secret government project called Dumbwaiter. The title might have been humorous if not for the heinous nature of the work we were doing. As psychologists, we were assigned the task of creating dedicated assassins, men devoid of personal volition, who would do anything—anything—that they were ordered to do. Mind control, it is sometimes called. The CIA had, for a short period, thought that the drug LSD might be useful in this pursuit, but instead of creating drones they spread cosmic consciousness. Once this failed, the Behaviorists were called in.
“My lab was situated in a large, old Victorian house out in the woods. No one would have suspected that some bizarre Cold War experiment was taking place in its basement. I had two partners and, working off Jaynes’s theory, through surgery and the implanting of pig arteries and chimpanzee neurons, we widened and filled the anterior commissure in a test subject’s brain in order to increase the volume of the auditory hallucination. Through conditioning, my voice became the voice of God for our subject. I was always in his head. One verbal command from me and my order would remain with him, inside his mind, until the task was completed.”
What else was I to think but that Malthusian was pulling my leg. “Do I look that gullible?” I said and laughed so hard I spilled a drop of my wine on the table.
The old man did not so much as smile. “We had created a zombie,” he said. “You laugh, but you should be laughing at yourself. You do not realize how, without any of our work, the human mind is so perfectly suggestible. The words ‘obedience’ and ‘to listen’ share the same root in more than half a dozen languages. With our experiment, this man would do whatever he was told. The results even surprised us. I instructed him to learn fluent French in a week. He did. I instructed him to play a Chopin nocturne on the piano after only hearing it once. He did. I instructed him to develop a photographic memory. I commanded him to stop aging. At times, for the purpose of a particular assignment, I might instruct him to become fatter, thinner, even shorter.”
“Impossible,” I said.
“Nonsense,” said Malthusian. “It has been known for some time now that the mere act of deep thought can change the physiological structure of the brain. If only my colleagues and I could publish our findings, others would also know that prolonged, highly focused thought is capable of transforming the physiological structure of more than just the brain.”
It was obvious to me at this time that Malthusian’s illness had affected his mind. I put on a serious face and pretended to follow along, exhibiting a mixed sense of wonder and gravity.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.
“Why, yes, why,” he said, and, more astonishing than his tale, tears began to form at the corners of his eyes. “The zombie had been useful. Please don’t ask me specifically how, but let us just say that his work resulted in the diminution of agitators against democracy. But then, with the end of the Cold War, our project was disbanded. We were ordered to eliminate the zombie and set fire to the facility, and were given large sums of cash to resume normal life—with the threat that if we were to breathe a word about Dumbwaiter to anyone, we would be killed.”
“Eliminate the zombie?” I said.
He nodded. “But I had pangs of conscience. My own God was talking to me. This man, whom we had hollowed out and filled with my commands, had been kidnapped. Just an average healthy citizen with a wife and a small child had been taken off the street one day by men in a long dark car. His loved ones never knew what had become of him. Likewise, I had made a deal to never see my own family again when I promised to work on Dumbwaiter. I disappeared after my parents and sister were brought to this country. For me to contact them in any way would mean their demise. I have missed them terribly through the years, especially my sister, with whom I had a strong bond after surviving the horrors of the old country. For this reason, I could not dispose of the zombie.”
“That would be murder,” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“It would have been murder either way,” said Malthusian. “Either I killed the subject or they killed us and our subject. Instead, I took a chance and left to the ravages of the fire a cadaver we had on ice there for many years. We hoped that no one was aware of it, that if a body was found in the ashes that would be enough to suffice. Remember, this is the government we are talking about. We had worked for them long enough to know that their main priority was silence.” Malthusian went silent himself, nodding his head upon his chest. I thought for a second that he had fallen asleep. When I cleared my throat, he reached for the wine but stopped. He did the same with the cigarette case. Then he looked up at me.
“I’m dying,” he said.
“This very moment?” I asked.
“Soon, very soon.”
“Did they tell you that at the hospital?”
“I’m a doctor. I know.”
“Is there something you need me to do? Do you want me to contact your sister?” I asked.
“No, you must not mention any of this. But there is something I want you to do,” he said.
“Call the ambulance?”
“I want you to take care of the zombie until the transformation is complete.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, and smiled.
“He’s here with me, in the house. He has been with me all along since we burned the lab.” Malthusian dropped the cane on the floor, leaned forward on the table and reached for me with his left hand. I pushed the chair back and stood away from the table to avoid his grasp.