Now Barnier continued: “My guess is that they must have cut into the wider inhibitory systems by mistake, dopamine reward systems, who knows. But they ended up creating retards or helpless monsters. Like that guy who tried to ravish Chemda, what was his name again?”
“Ponlok. His name was Ponlok.”
“So this explains it.” Julia shook her head. “This also explains why people volunteered for the experiments.”
“Uh huh. Yes, it does, does it not? The real committed Marxists volunteered. They wanted to be perfected, like Cathars, they wanted to be stain-free Communists, to have their guilty bourgeois minds cleaned and purified.” He spat smoke. “A quite magnificent dramatic irony, worthy of Flaubert. Given that it happened in maybe the most revolting regime in the world — because if anyone should feel guilt it is the Khmer Rouge.”
Jake ignored his beer and asked, “So how did you end up here? What happened to you in the seventies?”
Barnier sucked on his cigarette. “Like I told you. First they took us to China, and that was bad, dark, unsettling. And then we went to Kampuchea and that was just… Aii, that was just motherfucking horrible. As soon as we landed in Phnom Penh I could smell it! You could smell the desolation and fear. And there was the silence. Like a dead city, like Venice in a very bad dream. No cars. No laughter. No one talking. Just whispers. Whispers and heat and decay. And those eerie, eerie streets. My God, those empty streets.” Barnier downed another drink, and ordered yet another.
Jake said, “But what actually happened? What did you do there, in Cambodia?”
“Same as China. Zero. I was ignored, because by then they knew they really wanted guys like Ghislaine, neurologists and historians and shrinks and the like. These important guys would be whisked away in jeeps, while I would stay in my creepy hotel, staring at the Tonle Sap, thinking about death. And one day I lost it, I just decided: enough. So I sneaked out of the hotel and I slipped my KR handler and I found a bicycle in one of those empty streets and I picked it up and rode out into the countryside.” He shook his head. “And I saw for myself. Out there, in the countryside. Oh my God. I saw the truth, Jake. I saw with my own eyes the fucking reality of their perfect Marxist revolution. Everyone was wearing black, black pajamas, building these stupid irrigation canals, in the sun, carrying mud in baskets, barefoot. Sliding around in the mud. Skeletal. I saw people pulling plows. People. Not animals, people.” He gazed, furious, at nothing. He continued. “They weren’t even robots, they were beasts, beasts of burden. Silent serfs. No one spoke. I cycled around and stared and listened and I heard nothing. Just people working in the mud. And it was then I realized: this place was a prison, just one big prison. An entire country turned into a concentration camp, a whole nation doing forced labor.” He coughed angry smoke. “That did it for me. I rode back, I was trembling all the way. Almost sick in the street. Pretty soon I started asking questions and I got one or two people to talk, and they told me about the killings, the many killings. People were being killed for anything, for wearing glasses, for planting their own potatoes, for speaking a foreign language, for loving their children too much, for writing, for talking, for dancing, for laughing — you really could get killed for laughing in Cambodia under the KR, you could get your head smashed against a tree for being happy, because laughter and happiness were capitalist, and soon after I just quit. They let me go, all they did was tell me not to talk about the conferences, and I didn’t. Other people got more stringent restrictions: they were told to lie low for their whole careers, afterward. So no one would guess what the Communists were doing. Everyone had to conceal their discoveries and sacrifice themselves, to the greater project — revolutionary Marxism.”
Julia said, “And that’s why Ghislaine went back to Lozère. That’s why he reacted so weirdly when I found the skulls.”
Barnier agreed, vehemently: “In his later years, he must’ve been fucking conflicted, like your friend Annika said. There he was, once a brilliant young scientist, with a brilliant new theory, based on the skulls and the bones of Lozère, the cave paintings, and Prunières; and yet he was told to trash it, to forget it, to destroy his essays, to kill his own career. And then along you come and you find some more skulls, and he is reminded of all this, the waste of his life and his theories.”
“He was told to do this, to stay silent,” Jake asked, “because it’s what the Cambodians wanted?”
“Ah no.” Barnier shook his head. “No no no. Not the Cambodians. The Chinese, of course. The Chinese were in charge of the whole thing. That’s what I always understood, this experiment was always a Chinese operation, they had the money and ambition and the idea, but they used the little Cambodians, their lunatic Maoist acolytes, the craziest regime in the world, as useful lieutenants. The Chinks were farming it out to the Khmer, outsourcing, franchising.”
“Why?” Jake asked.
“This was ’76. China was in turmoil. Mao was dying. The extreme Maoists needed somewhere to work undisturbed, and Cambodia was their death laboratory, a fucking socialist playpen.”
A beggar with no legs dragged himself past Tony Roma’s pizza outlet.
Jake asked, “And what happened to you then? Why are you here? Why were you in Abkhazia? Why have you been traveling around the world, trying to work out the past?”
Barnier exhaled smoke, his face sallow and his brow darkened. It seemed that he’d grown sick of himself.
“Because I have my own searing guilt at being involved in any of this. I remember ’79, when the Khmer Rouge fell, I remember watching my TV in Lyon and seeing it: all my worst suspicions confirmed, the whole damn country had devoured itself, inside out, two million dead. A quarter of the nation. The nation that cut off its own legs, gouged out its own eyes. And that’s when I renounced it, that’s when I was born again — a capitalist. A simple capitalist and proud of it.” He was glaring at Jake defiantly. “I moved to Hong Kong, then LA, and then Singapore, and I used my guilty brain and became a day trader, a money broker. I wanted to be as un Communist as possible, and it did the trick. I made my money and I fucked myself a lot of poontang, and, you know what, if I have to die now then to hell with it, kill me, kill me, for I have sinned. But at least I’m not a cunting Communist, not anymore.”
Barnier drank the residue of his whiskey in one toss. “And in the last couple of years I have used my money to try to find out what really happened in China, and Cambodia. I went to Angkor, ’cause I knew the KR were interested in Angkor. I went to Sukhumi. But none of it really made sense, until now. Until lovely Miss Kerrigan told me this theory, and you told me your story. I suppose I should be thankful to you both. Explaining just how evil my life has been.” He laughed. Bitterly.