The Cause Read online

  I laughed. “Scared? I’m not scared. Save your shrink degree for The Abattoir, Bunny.”

  “You’re all fine,” she said. “Just like always.”

  I smiled and winked at her. Out in the distance, a half a mile down the road, came the faint flicker of headlights. A black van appeared. Someone trotted out of the hangar while Briana walked back in. The guy went and opened the chain-linked gate. The van pulled in and parked among the six others. Grus and Bunker jumped out with their driver, Bunker with a wide grin on his face. He bounced toward me and yelled out, “Thought I wasn’t going to make it, didn’t you?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Striding past me towards the hangar he said, “Look at you trying to bag the Energizer Bunny while I’m away.”

  Grus walked past. “We had to wait for Elliot and Harold, both of whom didn’t show.”

  “Pussies.”

  “Maybe,” Grus said, “or just smarter than the rest of us.”

  Then it started in earnest. A guy in a dull-green camouflage jumpsuit walked up to us with a clipboard. “Sanders, Richards, O’Donnell, Davis, Pugs, Blanchard—you’re out. You can go home.”

  “What the fuck?” Pugs said, losing his temper. “Why even bring us here if you’re just going to boot our asses right back?”

  “Decisions of who goes are made last minute by The Abattoir. You didn’t make the cut.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Blanchard roared. “You got to give us a reason!”

  “It doesn’t say,” the airman said, avoiding eye contact. “It never says. But that’s the way it is. It’s their plane, and without their approval, you don’t get on.”

  The airman scribbled on his clipboard while the six drivers formed a tight wall around him. More argument, but the airman stood his ground, waiting for them to leave. When they were finally driven out, the airman asked if we knew what was going to happen next. A Japanese guy named Kumo stepped forward, ready to take us up in a plane. Words were brief. We were led into a large room inside the hangar, black-bagged, drugged, and then all thirty-two of us, one by one, slipped into dream and hallucination, time like a piston compressing and expanding until we reached our destination.

  We rose dressed in medical robes, dry-mouthed and foggy from a drug-induced haze, Kumo nudging us awake with a dirty bare foot. We found ourselves spread out on cots inside a mildewed plywood barrack, trees punching through sawed-out holes in the roof. My clothes were piled next to a sports bag full of my personal belongings. I leafed through the pile of clothes to find my Earth photo still tucked in the pocket of my undershirt. Briana and Chloe were hastily putting on their clothes under the covers.

  A case of water sat on the floor in the middle of the room. Each of us rushed to get one, but something was off. I did a head count.

  “Who’s missing?” Conroy asked. He had noticed too. Three guys were missing. Guzzling his water, he broke off and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Conroy stood in my vantage point, blocking my view. His dark, gun-barrel eyes danced in his head glaring at someone beyond his spiked-up jet-black hair. As he moved to the side, a figure emerged. We saw the grotesque form of a man appear. He sat furtively hunched over, the weight of his bulbous head pushing him into a coil. His lopsided jaw twisted sideways on his face, and his cheeks were severely sunken. His head was a fat club, body a stick, and eyes with round black pupils more animal than human. Around his neck, the skin was a splotchy café au lait.

  “Where did you come from?” Bunker asked.

  “The same place as you,” the stranger said. “The womb.”

  “Not from my mother’s,” Bunker said with a laugh.

  The man glared at him as if he were staring at an alien, reversing the look we were giving him.

  “Are you military?” I asked.

  “No,” the stranger said. “My name is Uriah, and I have come to train, just as you.”

  “When did the entrance requirements drop?” Bunker said.

  “I’ve earned my spot,” the stranger said.

  While the others looked on, Mir, the Peepshow Perv, shrugged and went back to pinning up centerfolds above his cot. “We’re out here now,” he said. “Expect the unexpected.”

  Bunker smirked at the comment, then began calling the man “Clubhead,” to which the stranger replied, “You’ll be the first one I make an example of.”

  As Bunker went at him, Kumo barged back inside, eyes aglow with the fresh morning heat. “Lineup outside. Now!”

  As Kumo turned, Conroy called out, “What happened to the others?”

  “They were left. They never made it here. Now move your asses outside.”

  Chapter 3

  “Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.”

  -Archidamus, Spartan King

  The humid land gave us no clues to where we might be. Perhaps Africa. Perhaps Central or South America. Perhaps India. Perhaps Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Somewhere with sticky terrain and boiling air. Our bodies were in constant drip. Shirts were damp and mottled with sweat, our faces waxy and glistening.

  We were deep in a dense jungle surrounded by a rampart of trees. Animal, reptile, and insect sounds reached our ears—the howling of monkeys, the croaking of frogs, the layered screeching of a thousand different insects. Our voices thrummed strangely in tune to the cacophony in the midst of the bombed-size clearing we stood in. The whole jungle was a humungous breathing being, and we were stuck in the stomach of it. We were food, the prey for this place, and any sense of free will we must have had melted away when the clouds rolled in.

  The rain trickled at first. We stood there silent in two rows of fifteen each. We stood stiff-backed and straight-shouldered waiting patiently under the light drizzle while Kumo sat on a tortoise-sized stone whittling a stick into an arrow with a shiny nine-inch Bowie. Occasionally, he gazed up at us, rotating his eyes over ours, staring into our souls. Then he would shake his head gravely and go back to shedding the stick.

  We watched Kumo and wondered how much he knew, how important he was. His face was elongated and oblong. A skin-headed Japanese, gaunt and lank with wide, insect eyes. He was taller than he should have been for a Jap. My height, six-foot-two, minus the meat. His smile, boyish under a praying mantis face. He wore a pair of fatigue shorts extending to the knee. Bare-chested and bare-footed, muddy with droplets of rain glistening off his face, he seemed animalistic, a jungle character, a Jap Tarzan with stretched out simian arms—arms that could throw a jab on the button of your nose from ten yards away. I glanced around at the others looking at him. Our thoughts brooded without conclusion.

  After a while, whispers broke out through the lines. Kumo told us to be silent. We should stand and listen to what the jungle was telling us. And so we did. For four more long hours. It felt like we hadn’t eaten in a day. None of us was sure of the amount of time that had passed, but this was a new day, and the day before it we had left early in the morning. We were still drowsy from the drugs. Thirst, once again, set in. One of the men on the front line, David Rigby, began to slouch, tilting his head, slowly drifting off. Kumo, whittling with his knife, glanced up and saw him. He bounced up from his seat with a stone in his hand, and in a flash threw it at Rigby. The stone had been the size of half a fist and hit Rigby hard on the forehead. Rigby crumbled to the ground. Kumo shouted for no man to move. We obeyed, standing more rigidly than before. Then he went up to Rigby with his nine-inch Bowie and bent down over him. Rigby’s head bled into his closed eyes. Kumo traced the tip of the blade around Rigby’s face, dug a bit into the skin of his cheek, perhaps to see if Rigby was really out cold. Then he stood up and grabbed some zip ties from his pocket. He hogtied the bleeding man and dragged him toward the woods. Then he opened a trap door to a hole in the earth and slid Rigby into it. It would be the last I saw of David Rigby.

&nbs
p; By mid-afternoon, a thicker set of clouds moved in, grey and languid, as if they had all the patience in the world. Floaters rolling like tanks across the atmosphere from a strengthening squall. Kumo gazed up at the sky and spoke for the first time since we were silenced. “Lesson from the heavy rain,” he said, snickering at us. “Now you will start to learn bushido.”

  The rain fell in heavy drops and plunked on our heads. Out in the distance we saw more thunderclouds, purplish giants, swirling in wind-sheared, dark-grey cylinders up into the stratosphere and moving fast. The sky split and lightning jolted out of the pregnant clouds, murderous rain pouring furiously, sheets of it like curtains in the distance. I peered down the line. There were others peeking about. Kumo stood there with his severe eyes bulging out at us. Slowly the group came to attention—feeling the purpose without words or communication. This was a test.

  The thunderclouds swept in on us. Lightning lit up the sky, cracking into the forest, the storm coming to humble us as its weight sunk us deep into the mud. Wind slapped our faces. The sideways rain needled our bodies as hot as stinging fire ants. Kumo sat there, sometimes peering at us with madman eyes while taking a pause from whittling sticks and fitting them with arrowheads.

  After an hour, the rain lightened and finally the showers subsided and the jungle once more came alive with insect noise. Then he appeared like a phantom out of the woods, stepping out from the steam wafting off the forest. None of us laid an eye on him until he was right in front of us. He was shorter than I had imagined—five-foot-ten or -eleven, no more. He could have been Goliath the way the men had spoken about him. I imagined a Leviathan. And while I had heard only small stories and anecdotes—how he was called The Conductor for his legendary patience, how in his best days, if you were in his radius, you were a living corpse—I didn’t put much belief in the small bits of chatter. Knowing we were drugged and brought here, I sensed an inflation of the truth. Stories of voodoo. Stories to psych you out. Tall tales.

  Now that he was here, Kumo stood up. He was rugged-looking, dressed in fatigues with muddied boots. He seemed to carry the jungle with him. Moss and mud caked his face. Hair was slathered and damp, stringy and dripping, melting from his head. He walked over to Kumo, greeting him by placing a hand on Kumo’s heart. Kumo did the same. A beetle scurried over his neck and he simply let it roam.

  Three others slithered out of the forest. Those whom, with Kumo, would later be known as the Sons of Liberty, Ahanu the Native American, Des, and straggle-bearded Merrill. The leader craned his neck watching them, gave them a little nod and tipped them a smile, one laced with brotherhood and familiarity. He raised his hand. When he spoke, the first words out of his mouth were this:

  “Welcome to The Abattoir. My name is Seee. And now I will tell you a little parable about life, which in contrast to its words, is what life is truly about.”

  He placed a hand on Kumo’s shoulder, looked at him as if this were the beginning of something they had done many times. Then he turned to us and began.

  “A man died and went to Hell and sat around a table of fire with bodies burning around him. In the center of the table was a pitcher of an exotic drink steaming at the rim. He was given a glass and drank and never had he tasted anything so divine. He asked where the drink came from. A flaming soul sitting at the table said to him, ‘It comes from the last remaining Lushing Tree that stands in an oasis in the Sahara. Its fruit falls into a hole and arrives here.’”

  I glanced down the line. The same baffled expression was ubiquitous. Split covered his mouth, fighting back a yawn.

  “The man then went to Heaven and through a maze of clouds entered a chamber where on a table this same drink was being poured from a golden jug steaming once more from the rim.”

  He moved a couple of paces toward us, eyes moving into ours, forcing us to attention.

  “Amazed that perhaps the same drink existed in Heaven, he was eager for a glass and given one. When he drank, he felt excruciating pain. Fire spread throughout his veins and his whole body felt as if it were ablaze. Once the pain subsided, he cried out, ‘How can this be—a drink that brings so much pleasure in Hell, yet so much pain in Heaven? Is it the same fruit from the only remaining Lushing Tree?’ Satan appeared and answered him, ‘Yes, it is from the same tree.’

  “‘But how could this be?’ the man exclaimed. ‘It must fall from a different branch.’

  “‘Do you believe the anatomy of a tree is any different from one branch to the next?’ Satan asked.

  “The man contemplated this and finally said, ‘No, I do not.’

  “‘Then how do you explain this difference?’

  “‘Maybe it is the route to each destination which is different, and the route changes the characteristics of the fruit.’

  “‘The fruit has not changed, nor the passage from where it came,’ God said. ‘Only what you see has changed.’”

  The air stiffened. Silence. Thirty men staring at him and not one dared utter a word. The sound of the jungle grew louder in our ears, layer after layer colliding in intersecting waves. We waited for a cue, a direction from him, a question, or simply a word. The insects throbbed with the sound of his pacing boots slogging in the mud. Time simply ticked on.

  The meaning of the parable was simple enough to grasp—God and Satan—Heaven and Hell were the same. As was the allegorical fruit. Perception had changed, and this was the point. But I was only partially right at the time. Later I would understand another interpretation. The Lushing Tree was “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” legal speak for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

  After another minute, he led us to the point he wanted to make. “Does good and evil really exist? Is the universe just? Becoming a warrior of The Abattoir requires you to look at things differently, to see the truth and not deny its existence, to stretch yourselves beyond what you currently know and accept. And when battle comes, to understand clearly what it is you are fighting for.”

  He moved in front of us, inspecting the eyes of each man. “Besides becoming the best warrior you can be, you will learn new philosophies. You will study the rituals and training of the great warriors of the world. You will study the common denominator to all of them, which is that a great warrior comes from the courage of the internal spirit rather than the brutishness and power of the external body. You will learn sacrifice, brotherhood, weaponry—both new and old. You will learn new languages. You will learn how to get away from your enemies. You will learn technology—some of which you’ve never seen before. You will learn fear. Today, you will be born to a new world that you never knew existed.”

  He was silent for a moment, allowing the veins popping out in his forehead to simmer.

  “But listen carefully. I am a fair man today, but this I do not always promise. You will have one week here to decide whether or not you want to stay. One week to decide whether or not you want to be pushed back into the womb. After that, you are here, for better or worse.”

  He moved among the two lines. “I will also tell you that of those who come here, only seventy-five percent survive. This camp is serious. The training you will receive is real and unforgiving. All of you,” he said sweeping his finger past each one of us, “all of you will change if you stay. You will not be the same person who came in here.”

  It was my turn, and he passed his eyes into mine. I glared back seeking out a weakness.

  “All of you who stand before me today might have killed someone in the past. None of you has killed in the manner you will kill if you stay.”

  He tapped me in the chest with his index finger as if he were singling me out. “I will not lie. Some of you here might kill the man standing next to you if I wish it. This is not a place to guard a conscience or covet moral dilemmas. You will be asked to do what civil society calls horrendous things, things that violate the social rules you have grown up with. What I want you to take away is this. I want you to imagine the worst thing you can possibly do to another person. I want
you to sit down tonight and write out that list, whether that be cannibalism, chopping someone’s head off, or whatever the worst thought your brain can come up with. Then I want you to realize with uncertain doubt that that fear is in the realm of possibilities. Your lists will not be complete. This I promise. Do not doubt me on this score.”

  He shed his sopping, mud-caked shirt and wiped away the grime on his face with it. Many years later this scene would play out in my mind, and I would wonder exactly what he was doing out there under the storm. Perhaps, letting the monsoon pour over him in some jungle clearing. I saw him laying supine, welcoming the incoming thunderclouds with open arms. The storm threw down streams on the lush land, Old Testament rain, rain that lasted for three hundred and seventy days. There he was bedding down with insects in the mud. Beetles, ants, earthworms crawled all over him. Seee with his eyes closed, absorbing every moment of it while he meditated on a future perhaps just as devious.

  “So let’s begin with who has the guts to face me.” He took off his trousers and Kumo threw him a pair of boxing shorts.

  Sometimes people do unexplainable things, cowardly or courageous. They react without thought or provocation. Is the act of the Good Samaritan who steps in front of a bus to save a jaywalker more for the sake of the other person or a deeper test of putting oneself in danger and facing one’s own mortality? Perhaps this question punctured deep into my thoughts at the time. Maybe it was Briana starting down the line looking me up and down with eyes asking if I was scared. Or perhaps it was purely boldness, an unfettered belief that I was superior, that I could take him, or anyone. But even with a 16-2 MMA record, I remembered feeling surprised seeing my own traitorous left foot step forward out of the ranks in challenge of the one who offered it. Or maybe it was something simpler—the first reckless chance to make good on my promise to the station chief Pelletier.

  Chapter 4