Weaponized Read online

  “I can’t believe the legs this story has…”

  “And you really shouldn’t have run.”

  “What do you mean? I’m named in suits by Judicial Watch, Truth and Justice Watch, the ACLU…top of that, I was handed subpoenas from two different Senate subcommittees. I’m facing, at minimum, two years of jail time for contempt of Congress. I’ve been accused of helping to transform America into a fascist state. What did you want me to do? Sit on the couch and wait it out?”

  “It made you look guilty, running.”

  “I should have stayed and fought?”

  “If you didn’t do anything.”

  “I didn’t. That’s why I ran.”

  “Right…”

  “I’ve told you a thousand times, I did my job. That is all. I worked on weapons proliferation.”

  “Then come home, man. Come home. You are missed.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. Cut a deal with the government.”

  “They’re not offering.”

  “Make them an offer.”

  “Stop acting like this is some fucking choice I have.”

  “You need to make a deal with someone. It’s your only option.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Kyle…you worked in DC. You know this. Somewhere, someone wants to cut a deal.”

  “Chandler is the government.”

  “Then why is he on TV being grilled?”

  “Public relations. Why do you think he agreed to show up? Does he look worried to you? This is a dog-and-pony show. They asked him to show up. He gave them his permission to do this to hide the really big issues.”

  “Make a deal.”

  Kyle exhales.

  “I know that sound,” Neil says. “Means you think, somehow, you give it another year, this shit’s gonna blow over. Listen to me. Chandler put a live tap on every telecom circuit…and you’ve been accused of building the network to slice through everything his taps sucked up. You think this is blowing over? Even England, CCTV capital of the world, thought a live tap was nuts. They backed off. This makes Bush’s FISA scandal look merely indecent. Reach out. Make a deal. Or don’t reach out and make a deal. Just come home.”

  “Minute I get off the plane in the States, they’ll throw the cuffs on me. I’m obstructing justice with my absence.”

  “And I’ll be there for you, with a lawyer, and then I’ll run an exclusive.”

  “No way, man…I’m not some martyr.”

  “Why’d you do it in the first place?”

  “What?”

  “Go work for Chandler. Why? You had to know how it was gonna go down; everyone around him has a habit of self-immolating.”

  “I thought I could make a difference…maybe.”

  “Right. Change-the-system-from-the-inside kinda thing, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “But at what cost?”

  “Right,” Kyle says.

  Then the call goes dead.

  3.

  PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA

  Kyle signs off Skype, closes the window with Chandler’s testimony, logs onto one of Neil’s feeder publications, and is greeted by a color photograph of himself wearing a tuxedo that could charitably be called ostentatious. He remembers when the photo was snapped. Chandler was in the habit of holding seasonal banquets in his own honor. This particular fete celebrated his philanthropic endeavors, and Kyle was there to introduce several disadvantaged teenagers who would be summer interns at one of Chandler’s sixteen companies.

  Kyle looks at himself in the tux, clean-shaven, hair sculpted, genuine grin, and he shudders at what he must look like to most people these days. Above the picture, the headline shouts:

  “From Revolutionary Son to Corporate Fascist: Kyle West in His Own Words.”

  Kyle sees all the trigger words below: born in Palestinian training camp…grew up in East Berlin under Stasi protection.

  The feeling starts again. The heart squeeze, the arterial tightness, the cold sweat.

  He slides open the balcony door and gets, instead of air, a gut punch of heat and haze.

  The sky is pregnant with rain, ready to pop. The sun presses down like an anvil. Two bougainvillea plants rest on the balcony, one on either side, dying. Their plumed purple faces have turned pale.

  A branch of heat lightning bisects a cloud.

  April certainly is the cruelest month.

  Kyle rests his hands on the metal railing and then withdraws them in shock. He can’t believe the surface has soaked up so much heat this early in the morning.

  He peers over the rail at the Mekong River. The lifeblood of the Khmer people. The water is a shade of rusted brass stained by silt carried in from Laos. Houseboats bob along, ramshackle materials, collage art as shelter. Gnarled doors, beach towels as curtains, rusted roofs, NGO-donated tarps, bullet-riddled plaster walls, torn screens, empty oil drums for furniture.

  Several houseboats have been pushed together to form a floating village. The suburbs of the postapocalypse, a hellish atoll.

  His skin starts to burn.

  A naked child stands on a jagged metal plank jutting off the side of a houseboat and pisses into the river. His mother—a land-mine victim, Kyle assumes; she’s missing her right arm and foot—pulls the laundry off a clothesline running between her boat and another. The father dumps their waste into a welcoming wave.

  Fishermen are caught in the Mekong’s version of morning gridlock. Some have floated farther from the dock than others, and Kyle can make out only the shadows of their straw hats, dozens of Tom Sawyers steering splintered wooden boats. Fishing as a family business. Fathers steer, sons paddle, wives and daughters unfurl nets.

  He feels the first buds of cold rise on his skin, signaling a deeper burn.

  He puts on his sunglasses and tries to find a thought to hold on to, to ride out. His thoughts go in circles now. Extended exile opens the door to that habit. Actually, it opens the door to two habits: endless reflection and alcoholism. He tries to remember what his favorite philosopher in college—E. M. Cioran—said about exile; something about it beginning with exaltation and ending in tuberculosis and masturbation.

  He raps his fingers against the railing, decides to head out to anywhere with people. It doesn’t matter if he can’t understand what’s being said. He needs sound, needs to hear speech.

  4.

  Heat shimmers on tin roofs. Everything’s gone aqueous, doubled.

  Kyle sprints out the back door of the hotel. He needs to keep moving, feels as if he’s exploding out of his skin. Staying embodied is his main challenge these days. He wants to burst out, to become free of himself.

  Across the street, there’s a makeshift village of slum houses built side by side, no breathing room between. The shanties seem to wilt in the heat and lean on one another for support, a series of dislocated shoulders. Laundry stretches from window to window. A hunk of steel—probably the side of a building at one point—stands before the structures, the gateway to a cardboard kingdom.

  But what dangles from the top of the steel stops him dead.

  Ropes of human hair tied into perfect individual ponytails and drying in the sun like smoked meats. All the hair is the same length and color: dark brown and long enough to reach the small of a woman’s back. It looks like the work of an executioner bored with lopping off heads and searching for a new thrill.

  Kyle drifts, wonders where all the hair is going, then decides he doesn’t want to know. There are some truths that don’t enlighten, and he figures the ultimate destination of the hair is one of them.

  He moves down the street, passes a shirtless teenager dragging an overflowing sack of iPhones and iPods, the weight too much for his growing bones to bear.

  Kyle rounds the block, and a line of tuk-tuks compete for his attention.

  “Where you go?” a driver calls, following him.

  “Central Market.”

  “Get in.”

  “No, no…it’s only ten mi
nutes to walk.”

  “It’s too hot. You die in five.” The driver slows down. “Fifty cent. I take you anywhere.”

  “I’m…”

  “People die in this heat. Especially American. You not made for this.”

  The driver has a salient point. Kyle gets into the tuk-tuk, a small motorcycle attached to a separate passenger carrier complete with a ramshackle roof.

  “Wha’s your name?”

  “Jim,” Kyle says. Every day he tries a new one.

  “Sok,” the driver says. “Today my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  “Every day my birthday. I born in the jungle. Khmer Rouge come and take everyone there. No one knew what day it was, what month, year, nothing. No calendar. I was born in no time.” He laughs. “Have lots and lots of birthdays.”

  Kyle sinks into the back of the tuk-tuk.

  Born in no time.

  That’s his existence in Phnom Penh boiled down. No time. He’s lost twenty pounds of muscle since he touched down here, lost his resolve, his desire to get off the ground, his will to re-create rituals from home, those moments that personalize one’s world.

  But the most crushing loss has been losing his ability to write code.

  Kyle’s always felt that language, not the body, is the true prison house of the soul. When he lost coding, he lost his Edenic native tongue. Now he’s forced to rely on the same words everyone has to work with.

  Thus far, he’s not impressed with the results.

  He starts to drift, losing consciousness with his eyes open; like watching himself on television.

  The traffic snaps him back to the present right about when Sok decides to pulls a double-lane cross and merge, using his horn as an exclamation point.

  Driving in Southeast Asia is always dangerous, but Cambodia (and, in particular, Phnom Penh) is considered the crown jewel of potential catastrophe.

  Two lanes of traffic on one side. Another two lanes running parallel. And no barrier to separate the flows. If people don’t like one side, they simply swerve onto the other.

  No signals, no warning; punk-rock driving, all attitude and swagger. Cars, motos, tuk-tuks, lone cyclists, hotel shuttle vans, freewheeling pedestrians, trucks hauling timber or waste all flow together in a motley mix, crisscrossing from one side to the other.

  If one can be called an expert on such conditions, Sok deserves the title. His strategy seems to be driving straight up the middle and honking belligerently until someone lets him in.

  They pass a tuk-tuk filled with tourists holding out their cell phones and recording the drive, living through the lens. They’ll experience the trip when they get home. The ultimate authentication: sitting before your laptop with a glass of wine and watching yourself on vacation.

  Sok swerves around a police truck with a water tank attached to the back. An officer stands at attention, holding a hose and power-washing fresh blood off the highway.

  The tuk-tuk continues on, passing crumbling French architecture that survived the Khmer Rouge. Buildings like royalty in exile. Rococo palaces in disrepair, facades blasted. Ferroconcrete, glazed balconies, art deco, alien artifacts of former colonial status. The cracked jaw of a lost kingdom. And below these imposing structures, the Cambodians living like moles, so poor they hide under houses.

  Sok drives on the wrong side of a city bus, then hammers on the horn as a bunch of Buddhist monks in flowing saffron robes cross the street, chanting.

  Kyle taps Sok on the shoulder. “You can stop here. This is good.”

  5.

  The Central Market is a prime tourist site; built in 1937, it’s a massive art deco dome with four wings radiating from its center. The inside is a labyrinth of stands, merchants, and shops.

  Kyle stands in the heart of it. The unreal city. Bruised-fruit sky dripping phosphorescence. Even abject poverty looks ethereal in its glow. The crowded outdoor stalls selling black-market electronics; the local dealers with Buddhist handicrafts and traditional Khmer instruments; the infants running around bottomless, reminding everyone that diapers are in short supply. All of it has the tint of gold left at the bottom of the sea.

  No real pedestrian space. Bob-and-weave walking, like Sok moving through the traffic, and instead of horns, there’s the squawk of loudspeakers, the pitch and pluck of Khmer music, the cacophony of commerce.

  Kyle walks on. He scans faces, goes through his mental Rolodex, marks anyone who looks out of place. Distinct scents of stale urine, barbecue, fresh fish. Shadows with no source. “Want to drink blood?” someone asks. God, I hope it’s snake, Kyle thinks, although you never know.

  He passes a row of stands selling Chinese electronics; disposable cell phones; bootleg DVDs; computer software; wall outlets; pop-music CDs with no covers, just the artist’s name and the album title written in mangled English.

  Kyle points to a cell phone with prepaid minutes. He’s out of minutes and doesn’t like the feeling, even if he hasn’t called anyone in weeks. The owner slides it off the rack and pulls a price out of thin air. Jacked up a few dollars for the color of Kyle’s skin.

  Although the globalized economy is starting to crack open the city, it’s still free of occidental ornament. If all cities are whores, this is still Phnom Penh’s first week working the corner. In 1975, she had been more than your common streetwalker, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took care of that.

  Pol’s was the pinnacle of the revolutionary ladder that started with the Soviets or, some would argue, with Robespierre. For all the zealots who wondered whether the great social revolution had failed on its prior attempts because it didn’t go far enough, because of internal ossification, because the people lost their nerve and harbored secret bourgeois sympathies, Pol Pot provided the answer.

  What would it look like if the revolution went all the way?

  There would be no one left.

  No one was loyal enough to survive. No one was worthy enough to live in paradise.

  Extermination was the sole area in which Pol excelled. A failed technical student and a piss-poor electrician, capable of only a rudimentary understanding of Marxism—forget Hegel or Feuerbach—and an uninspired military leader who wasted thousands of troops in misguided offensives. Mao may have been the century’s biggest butcher, but there are a billion people in China. We wouldn’t talk of Pol Pot today if he hadn’t killed off a quarter of all Cambodians. And Phnom Penh bore the brunt of it.

  One of the first things Kyle noticed when he got here was the lack of middle-aged and elderly people. Pol and his Khmer Rouge had made sure of that: liquidate the cities, the intellectual classes, and then, as is de rigueur for all revolutions, liquidate yourselves. A country of orphans, average age of seventeen.

  The UN wouldn’t call what happened genocide because Pol Pot wasn’t looking to exterminate a specific group of people.

  He wanted to kill everyone.

  The Cambodians put up monuments, counted the bones, and wanted to move on. You had to.

  Kyle slows down, and the beggars and hustlers surround him. Some offer newspapers to rent so you can read while you eat, some a chance to squeeze off shotgun rounds at chickens, some visas for a hundred American dollars, some close-up views of skin diseases and the ravages of dengue fever, and some nothing but a glimpse of devastation.

  He loses his bearings, loses track of the faces.

  The girl is the victim of an acid attack, a frequent denouement to lovers’ quarrels in this part of the world. Kyle’s seen girls like her before, but this one has suffered horribly. Half her face has been scorched off—lips and one eye—and her arms and legs bear tremendous scars, tortured terrain. He figures she must have been wearing a sundress on the day of the attack. He tries to avoid looking at her mouth, a corrugated pinpoint, a scream that closed in around itself.

  He swallows hard and drops a dollar in her hand.

  He’s a block from Armand’s when he hears the shriek. Two cops have a monkey in a wire cage, and the fucker’s going
crazy. Banging around inside, trying to pry the bars apart. It takes both cops to hold the cage steady.

  The monkey’s a glue addict separated from his poison. He’s one of a gang of fifteen most-wanted that the cops are trying to round up. Pictures of the criminal simians line the walls of restaurants, offices, and embassies.

  They’re considered public enemies.

  The chief of police is on record as saying, “We treat them like people, like citizens. If they do crime, we will hunt them.”

  So how does a monkey end up sniffing glue and forming a habit? Street kids and criminals train them to pick pockets and snatch purses. One monkey scratches your leg or jumps on your back while the other snatches anything of value. On one such boost, a monkey scored a bottle of glue from a woman’s handbag and then huffed it. He brought it back home, and everyone got a turn. Before you knew it, there was an epidemic.

  The monkey keeps banging his head against the bars until he passes out.

  6.

  There’s no door. Only a threadbare beaded curtain. If people want to come in, they’re going to come in.

  At least, that’s how Armand sees it. It’s his life’s philosophy boiled down to a decorative flourish.

  The mirror behind the bar is sweaty and streaked, and anything reflected in it looks like the cover of a 1970s glam-rock album: Vaselined lens, vaguely space age.

  Kyle parts the beads, enters, approaches the bar, and leans on it with his elbow. He locks eyes with another Westerner, a woman wearing a muscle tee with a marijuana leaf on the front. The leaf curves around her breasts, and her tanned, toned shoulders finish off the fetching effect. Kyle can’t stop staring, but it’s not lust. He doesn’t like seeing new faces in Armand’s bar, especially new Western faces.

  “Another round, Armand,” she calls out.

  “Coming, my love,” he yells in return.

  Armand’s in the corner messing around with the television, playing with the picture. He finally gives up and broadsides the panel with his palm, causing it to miraculously come to life.