Julia was sobbing.
Soriya turned to Fishwick.
“Him next. Taˉ de xià yı¯gè.”
Fishwick was dragged to the side of the cliff by the sweating guards. The sun shone down on them all, harsh and uncaring. The neurosurgeon was not even struggling; his expression was resigned. His gray ponytail hung limply in the sun.
But Chemda intervened.
“No, please no—don’t kill him!”
Soriya turned. “Why not?”
“I am your sister, am I not? Your twin sister? Do this for me. Spare him.”
Soriya paused. A brief flash of emotion crossed the killer’s dark, impassive face. Illegible emotion: Sadness? Grief? Something profound and repressed. Jake watched, deeply intrigued. Julia was staring his way.
“For my sister?” Soriya gestured to the guards. “Ach. What does it matter. Let him go. I don’t care. But I will kill my grandfather. Bring me the axle.”
Fishwick was released; Sen was pushed to the edge of the precipice. The pine trees whispered in a mountain breeze; the gorges yawned, dark and hungry.
“Kneel,” said Soriya.
The grandfather knelt. Sen looked up and said, very quietly: “How did you get past the main guards? The inner barrier?”
Soriya shrugged. “They thought I was Chemda. They were confused.” She waved a hand at the sweating, scarred men, the excised men. “These other guards, your mistakes, they have decided to help me. I discussed this with them many months ago. I came here in secret. We agreed to all of this. They agreed. You invoke no loyalty, Sen. You mutilated so many. And without faith or fear or love, they care for nothing. There is no one to help you. Everyone in the laboratory has scattered. They know the PLA is coming.”
Sen smiled. “But you think this upsets me, daughter? Please. I am not grieved. I am not ashamed, I am proud of you. I wanted to create the perfect Communist child. And behold: I succeeded. Because here you are, guilt-free, devoid of mercy, and purely logical. My beloved granddaughter. Biologically atheist.”
“You gave me away. How beloved is that?”
“We thought you were a failure! You were taken in the anarchies, the dilapidations, when the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed in Anlong Veng. I never knew what happened to you, do you understand, my child? I didn’t dare hope that you had lived — the baby with the seizures, the fits — and yet, when I began to hear of these pitiless slayings, these cruel and clever murders, I knew. I aspired, Soriya, I hoped that you lived, that you thrived. I sensed you were coming, and I wanted to see you. So I could compare you with your superstitious sister, the control experiment. See if you had evolved. And I regard you now with true delight. My wonderful and beautiful experiment. My perfected, liberated, and entirely godless granddaughter.”
Soriya had taken a rusty iron bar from one of the guards. A car axle.
“I am not a granddaughter, I am not even a woman. I am not a man either. I am nothing. You made me into a nothing. Barely human. You severed me from everything. A freak with no breasts. See.”
She tugged open her shirt. Jake winced at the pale scar tissue she briefly exposed. A double mastectomy: two more wounds.
“By the time I was eighteen, I was desperate. Why was I so sick in the head? What was wrong with me? Why did I feel that something was wrong, something was missing? So I began to think maybe I was the wrong sex. And I went to Bangkok. And I had sex reassignment surgery.” Soriya sighed tersely and rebuttoned her shirt with one hand. She went on: “The surgeons cut off my breasts, took out my womb — and gave me hormone injections. Testosterone. And they told me to walk like a boy. This was meant, or so I hoped, to make me better. Turning me into a kind of kathoey. A she he.” She snarled at her grandfather, and clutched the iron bar tighter. “Yet it didn’t work. Of course. I was just angrier than ever. I had mutilated myself for no reason. I went back to America. Went back to being a girl. With no breasts. Mutilated. A man with no penis. Then I joined the army. At that, I was good, a surprisingly strong young woman. All those testosterone injections, all the steroids. So all this has been useful. It has helped me get here, where I can kill you.”
Sen’s smile was gone; for the first time Jake saw confusion on the old man’s face.
He mouthed a word but Soriya cut him off.
“Turn that way. Turn that way. Cheung Ek. Tuol Sleng. Highway Five. This is for everyone who died. For all the people killed by communism. For the country you beheaded. Turn that way.”
The first shudder of fear trembled at Sen’s mouth.
“You really think that I should die—”
The iron bar swung into the back of Sen’s head: the sound of the skull splitting was pulpy, organic, a plashing crack. The brains squirted into the dust, the broken head gaped open, pornographically. Soriya sneered at the sight, then she kicked the twitching body off the edge of the cliff.
“Now, you, give me a gun.”
One of the guards handed a revolver to Soriya.
“Throw me off the cliff when I’m finished. At least I can kill myself without guilt. The one thing they gave me.”
She turned and walked a few meters down the cliff and put the gun to her head, and, like she was slaughtering a hog with a bolt, she fired. Another shower of blood, another splatter of bone.
The weeping sound was Chemda — she had turned away from the scene, crying. Jake watched, absorbed. He watched as the scarred men did their duty: Soriya’s twitching body was hurled off the cliff. Vultures circled down the gorge, seeking the carrion.
Patches of blood and splinters of bone were glistening in the sun. A yak stared placidly at the men, who had already begun to disperse. The guards were drifting away, some now running.
Within moments, Fishwick, Julia, Chemda, and Jake were standing on the edge of Balagezong village. Quite alone. The wind murmured in the Yunnanese forests, soft breezes fluting their grief.
Or was it grief? Where was the grief?
Jake touched the scar on his head. It was stinging. He could feel the pain in his mind at war with the clarity. Guilt was still there, in his mind, yet he could not connect with it; it was a cherished poem he had forgotten, a beautiful song he could not quite recall. Just like his love for Chemda.
He felt suddenly blinded. He was blind to something. He had lost a sense. How could he have done that to Tyrone? Why didn’t he feel remorse?
As he touched his own face, he realized he had wetness on his fingers. Astonishingly, he seemed to be crying. But he didn’t know why.
“Chemda,” he said, “what have they done to me?”
She reached for his hand. Jake could feel the moistness, like tears, on his face, but he didn’t know what it was for. He wasn’t crying. He was just leaking. He was just fucking leaking. He was a machine, a dead battery, he was Soriya, he was pitiless. A soft machine leaking oil.
Jake hunched down. He wanted to make himself small, to hide from the world. This was bitter and disastrous, everything was futile.
Chemda stooped and kissed him and she whispered: “There is something we can do.”
47
She repeated, “There is something we can do. But there are dangers. Colin told me, a few days ago. That is why I asked Soriya to spare him.”
Fishwick knelt beside Jake and spoke. He was hesitant, repressing a stammer or deep emotions.
“The operation we did on you was cryosurgical. Stand… please…. Let me explain.”