Brainfire (2 page)

Hua Tse-Ling did not look at her, did not answer her questions, gave no impression of understanding where he was or what was happening to him. The reel of the old Grundig recorder turned stiffly, squeaking.

“What good are these questions?” the Politician asked. He was nibbling on his flask again; which, given the KGB presence, was perhaps a reckless thing. Andreyev could imagine the report, something turning up one day in the Politician's file—
drinks too much
. The KGB man stared momentarily at Andreyev and there was something of impatience, even a slow-fused temper in the look.

“He doesn't understand,” said the Politician. “Anybody can see that. Shit!” He spoke in a brusque way, someone accustomed to barking questions and getting immediate answers; but there was a defensiveness too, as if he were accustomed to having his own blood drawn in the pecking order of things.

Andreyev turned back to the Chinese soldier: what lay inside that dark-blue head? If he could lay bare the scalp and probe the brain, what ruptures and crevices might he find? What disturbances?

There was a silence in the room now.

Abruptly the KGB man came to a personal decision. In a move so quick that nobody in the room could quite follow, he whipped the back of his hand, a pallid but forceful blur, across Hua Tse-Ling's face. The soldier slumped sideways. A line of blood, the color of a dark rose, broke the surface of his lip.

“Was that necessary?” Andreyev asked. He felt disgust: in his world of research papers, graphs, laboratory techniques, electroencephalograms, alpha and beta waves, in this controlled world of hieroglyphic and symbol, each loaded with a precise significance of its own, he did not encounter the randomly violent. And now it appalled him. He looked at the figure of the soldier with pity.

“He doesn't fucking talk,” the Politician said. “Why doesn't he talk?”

Andreyev said nothing. Kneeling, he took a piece of tissue paper and dabbed the blood on the soldier's upper lip; he noticed the glazed reflection in Hua's eyes.
The mind has gone
, he thought.
Just like a match blown out
.

“Now he's the fucking Red Cross,” the Politician said, searching the room for some support of his bluster. But the KGB man was turned away and the Colonel was moving restlessly around the walls of the room in the manner of one who expects to discover the beauty of a hidden window, a view, a fine sunset taking him unawares. Outside, the wind was high again, shaking the silences, creating new drifts of snow and delightful aesthetic accidents.

The room, Andreyev realized, was filled with eddies of tension, little currents of vested interest, rivalries: they had not expected the experiment to work—but now they were more interested, each for his own reason, than they wanted to be. Take your pick, Andreyev thought: the military, the intelligence community, or the Politburo itself: it was like a lottery, the suspense of waiting for the winning ticket to be drawn. He stood up, stepping back from Hua TseLing.

“Hua Tse-Ling,” he said.

The soldier showed no interest, no recognition.

“Hua Tse-Ling,” he said again. Nothing, no response, zero. A little frustrated, Andreyev longed for them all to leave the room so that he could get on with his work.

The Politician was laughing. “Big deal,” he said. “Big fucking deal.”

The KGB man switched off the tape recorder: “Let's stop all the talk,” he said, confident in his world of bizarre secrecies, hidden dossiers, codes, smug all at once with the knowledge of a darkness nobody else in the room could penetrate, not even the Georgian. “Stop all the talk and do your damn tests.”

Andreyev looked at him: the broad face you would not remember from a crowd, the pendulous lower lip, the bottom jaw that jutted like a fleshy hook. Intelligence, he thought: how easily a word is misapplied. He was cold, suddenly colder than he had been in the snow.

“Do your tests, do your tests,” the KGB man said, now smiling slightly, the fleshy hook wobbling; but it was a parody of mirth—for the smile concealed myriad sins of both the past and the future; it secreted inquisitions, interrogations, all the arcane terrors of an unfathomable craft—and Andreyev realized suddenly that he was afraid of the outcome, that whatever lay ahead would have the insignia of the man's smile, that mirthless terror, stamped upon it.

“Do your tests,” he was saying again. “Then we can shoot the bastard and get a good night's sleep.”

3.

The tests—Andreyev thought at once of how comfortable he was with his world of tests; it was a battery that recharged him, a tranquilizer that soothed him; it was a place without conflict and stress. That it was also stripped of human connotation, rendered manageable by figures on charts, graph paper, made it somehow complete for him: a world without love and envy, without passion and rage—the benumbing clinicality seemed to him a wonder. Muscular reflex and coordination; examination of gross motor responses; an EEG that revealed only a slight irregularity of pattern in the soldier's brain—all this had nothing to do with the grubbiness he had felt before; it wasn't connected with fear and loathing, or sullied by paranoia: even the needle that carried sodium pentothal to Hua Tse-Ling's circuitry shone with an awful cleanliness. Even the fact that the tests revealed nothing of any significance did not unduly worry Andreyev; and the failure of the SP to alter the soldier's condition in any remarkable way—it was a chemical fact, a gospel of the blood. Andreyev was happy in this small world of balances and measures and quotients.

Katya said, “There's hardly any muscular reflex.”

Andreyev, who had been looking at Hua TseLing and sipping hot tea from a plastic container, was abruptly pulled back by the sound of his assistant's voice. He watched her a moment, remembering with some small shame the only time he had achieved intimacy with her—too many glasses of vodka at some scientific dinner, the ride through the streets of Moscow, the tiny rooms of his small apartment (cluttered; he had been embarrassed by his discarded underwear lying by the unmade bed); the drunken fumbling with her clothing and how, with an eagerness that appalled him to recall, she had assisted him with the clips and snaps and hooks of herself until she was naked in the cold bedroom, her gaunt figure reminiscent of a pioneer photograph, sepias shading into mists, an obfuscation of imagery and clarity; and the lovemaking, if you could call it that, a fumbling of octopi unexpectedly swept up on a beach, her arms and legs creating more limbs than merely four in his memory now. And as he looked at her across the room he understood that she was ready for him again, that he had only to say the word; a comprehension that moved him to sorrow, an insight into the loneliness of her life.

“Did you hear me?” she asked. She was smiling. A quite unpredictable glow touched her face when she smiled.

“I heard you,” he answered. He had an image of himself from a point outside, a flash: forty-three, a small man, his flesh chalky, an impression of somehow
crumbling
, of coming apart at the seams. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again he looked at Hua Tse-Ling; a part of the soldier was already dead; deep inside, some kind of congealing.

“They're going to kill him,” Andreyev said quietly.

Katya looked at him, raising her head quickly from her notes. “Does it surprise you?”

Don't, he thought. Don't let that sense of pity come, prevent that simple extension of humanity. But what could you do? There were times when the protective veneer he was supposed to wear like a suit of armor simply cracked open; and when he looked at Hua Tse-Ling he saw more than a laboratory study, he saw a man whose death warrant had already been signed. He wished he could reach inside the skull, understand the lacerations of consciousness; but there was inaccessibility—the very nature of the thing you studied was elusive as your own shadow: a whole box of tricks you could not open.

“No,” he said. “It doesn't surprise me.”

“What does?” she asked. She put one hand up to her brown hair, an imaginary curl. “Doesn't the success of this surprise you?”

Andreyev thought of success: Hua Tse-Ling had crossed the river—and at what cost? Was it just a freak show? After all, was it just that? Then he was thinking, despite himself, of how power operated, the ways in which it would try to make use, for one vicious reason or another, of all this
success
—a concussion of forces, the military and the scientific in a lamentable collision.
It's the way of things
, he thought. A simple justification: the way of things. What could one do? You could not live your life in a preserve jar, could you? It was important to go on, to continue work and ignore that other world—let it all slide away from your mind, the Kremlin summonses, the quickened interest in the eyes of generals, the inquisitions of the KGB. Let it all slide, it was the way of things: what could you do?

He heard his name being paged on the intercom. It surprised him:
Professor Andreyev
. He remembered where he was, a building in the center of a wasteland, a snowy wilderness. He went to the nearest telephone.

It was the Physician.

“How is she?” Andreyev asked.

“What do you expect me to say?” The Physician's voice was harsh; for that reason Andreyev thought of his childhood and how the crying of rooks would awaken him on summer mornings—barking birds, he had thought then, winged dogs whose noises rolled and rolled through the trees around the house in Kaluga.

“You can't go on exhausting her,” the Physician said. “I can't let you—”

Andreyev said, “It's not my decision, you know. Do you think I have a say in what happens to her? You're being naïve if you think I can stop all this with a wave of my hand—”

The Physician, calmer now, said, “She's seventy years of age, Professor. Does that put you in the picture?”

And then the line was dead. Andreyev held the receiver a moment, and when he set it back he noticed the initials
PVS
carved into the white wall above the instrument. They had been cut deep and they looked to him like fresh wounds.

“I don't think we can do anything else,” Katya said.

Andreyev looked once more at Hua Tse-Ling, then at the window of the room they were in—at the black glass against which, with increasing violence, the wind drove crystals of snow.

4.

Hua Tse-Ling—thirty-six years of age, according to his ID papers—was taken from the hospital and had his hands tied behind his back by his executioners—six infantrymen and a sergeant. The Colonel, the KGB man, and the Politician watched the proceedings in a neutral way. What did the death of one miserable Chinaman matter, the latter had asked, laughing, when you had more than eight hundred million of the bastards to worry about?

Hua was led to the wire fence around the compound—pushed rather than led, his limbs stiff, his head held at a forward angle.

The KGB man said, “What do you make of this experiment, Colonel?”

The Colonel drew up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Interesting.”

“Interesting?” The KGB man lifted one hand and, in a gesture that was in part intimate, in part intimidating, prodded the Colonel's chest. “You're sitting on a fence, friend.”

The Colonel shrugged, a gesture of uncertainty. “I'm only a soldier. An observer. I'm not qualified to say.”

The Politician, who had no interest in this conversation, watched the condemned man move to the fence. He dropped his flask, which sank into the soft new snow. He went down on his hands and knees to dig for it. When he found it he had difficulty getting to his feet, perpetrating a comedy of errors in the snow—fumbling, slipping, sinking. The KGB man gripped him by the elbow and helped him to stand.

Hua Tse-Ling was being roped to the wire fence; his face, from a distance of several hundred yards, suggested the smooth surface of a balloon, totally without feature. He had not been blindfolded, a generosity, an etiquette of assassination that in the circumstances would have been absurd.

The guns popped like last year's fireworks and what might have been a noise of reverberating viciousness was muffled by the falling snow; and the echoes, such as there were, were sucked away beyond the wire fence and the clump of trees in the distance. Hua Tse-Ling hung against the wire, his face tilted to one side in that unlikely loose way of death.

“Well,” said the KGB man. “End of experiment.”

“Or the beginning,” said the Colonel.

Pale smoke from the rifles was beginning to disintegrate in the wind and the snow as if nature, in one of her many conspiracies, were secretly erasing the traces of death.

2

1.

She could hear the Physician's voice coming to her through the drift of consciousness, meaningless clusters of words:
soon warm everything well warm don't worry don't
. And she was aware of motion, of the wheels of a locomotive running over rails.
Clackclacketyclack
. But wherever was she going? And what was the Physician, Domareski, trying to tell her? Her eyelids were heavy, half-moons of some dense metal. She couldn't look, she couldn't get her eyes open. Aaron, she thought—where is Aaron? He had to be in the garden, walking between the pines, the baby held in his strong arms. She wanted to call his name but knew there wouldn't be an answer. Why wouldn't he answer her? Aaron, beloved Aaron.
Soon the pain will be gone be gone gone
—Something sharp entered her arm and, even with her eyes closed, she could see the glint of Domareski's needle. A slight incision:
no more pain
.

She was a young girl, eyes clear, hair gold. She was a young girl and Aaron was her husband—but why was she panicked, thinking about him now? There were shadows, shadows within shadows, as if whatever feeble light fell was made to pass through barricade after barricade, obstacles. It was the panic, thinking of her husband, wondering where she was moving and why: it came down to fear. And even Domareski's voice—
relax I'm with you nothing bad can happen to you now
—even that soothing voice she so trusted did not diminish her feelings. Why would a young girl be traveling on a railroad? And why was Domareski afraid too?