“Best part, many scenes of torture. Scenes in infernal regions depicting punishment given souls after death. Very beautiful. Very instructive. Very scary.”
“What do you think?” Conor asked.
“It’s the punishment given souls before death that worries me,” Poole said. “But let’s have a look.”
The driver instantly cut across three lanes of traffic.
He dropped them off at the bottom end of a wide walk leading up to a gate with the words HAW PAR VILLA suspended between green and white columns. People streamed in both directions through this gate. Above it was a hillside of purple-grey plaster that to Poole resembled a section from a giant brain. A short distance away stood a taller, gaudier gate in the shape of a tiered pagoda. Chinese people in short sleeves and summer dresses, Chinese teenagers in wildly colored clothes, schoolgirls uniformed like boys at an English public school, old couples holding hands, crew-cut boys skipping along in short pants, all these people milled up and down the broad walkway. At least half of them seemed to be eating something. The sun sparkled off the white paint of the pagoda gate and threw deep black shadows across the slabs of the walk. Poole wiped sweat off his forehead. The day grew hotter every hour, and his collar was already damp.
They passed beneath the second gate. Just past a huge allegorical figure representing Thailand was a tableau of a peasant woman sprawled on the representation of a field, her basket lost behind her, her arms outstretched in a plea for help. A child raced toward her, a peasant in shorts and a pagoda hat extended an arm to threaten or aid. (The handout booklet explained that he is offering her a bottle of Tiger Balm.) Two oxen locked horns in the background.
Sweat poured down Poole’s face. He remembered a muddy field slanting down a Vietnamese hillside and Spitalny raising his rifle to sight on a woman scampering toward a circle of hootches beyond which lean oxen grazed. Her bright blue pajamas shone vividly against the brown field. Mosquitos. The heavy pails of water suspended on a wooden yoke over the woman’s shoulders hampered her movements: Poole remembered the shock of recognizing that the pails of water were as important to her as her life—she would not throw the yoke off her shoulders. Spitalny’s rifle cracked, and the woman’s feet lifted, and for a moment she sped along parallel to the ground without touching it. Soon she collapsed in a blue puddle beside the long curved yoke. The pails clattered downhill. Spitalny fired again. The oxen bolted away from the village, running so close together their flanks touched. The woman’s body jerked forward as if it had been pushed by an invisible force, and then began to roll loosely downhill. Her forearms flipped up, out, up like spokes on a broken flywheel.
Poole turned to Harry Beevers, who had glanced at the statues on top of the brain-wall and was now staring at two pretty Chinese girls giggling together near the pagoda gate. “Do you remember Spitalny shooting that girl outside Ia Thuc? The one in blue pajamas?”
Beevers glanced at him, blinked, then looked back at the sculptures of the farmer and his wife. He nodded and smiled. “Sure. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”
“No,” Conor said, “that was another
“She was obviously VC,” Beevers said. He glanced again at the Chinese girls as if they too were Viet Cong who ought to be executed. “She was there, therefore she was VC.”
The two girls were now walking past Beevers as if on tiptoe. They were slender girls with shoulder-length black hair and dresses of the sort, Poole thought, that used to be called frocks. Were there still frocks? He glanced up the hill and saw another pack of schoolgirls in uniform—dark blazers and flat hats.
“This whole place is back in the fifties,” Beevers said. “I don’t mean the gardens, I mean Singapore. It’s about 1954 over here. You get arrested for jaywalking, littering, and spitting on the street. You ever go to one of those towns out West where they reenact gunfights? Where the falls are all rehearsed and the guns have no bullets and nobody gets hurt?”
“Aw, come
“I have a feeling that’s Boogey Street,” Beevers said.
“Let’s find the torture chamber,” Poole said, and Conor laughed out loud.
On the crown of the hill, with a view down across the terraces and ornaments of the garden, stood a giant brain of gnarled, twisted blue plaster. A white sign announced in red letters: TORTURE CHAMBER HERE. “Hey, this doesn’t look so bad,” Beevers said. “I ought to get pictures of this.” He took his Instamatic out of his pocket and checked the number on the back. Then he went up the low concrete steps and through the entrance. Winking at Poole, Conor followed.
The cool, shady interior of the plaster grotto had been divided in half by a walkway from which one looked down through wire fences at a sequence of busy scenes. When Poole stepped inside, his friends were already well along, Beevers snapping shot after shot with his camera up to his eye. Most of the Chinese in the Torture Chamber stared at the tableaux beneath them without betraying any feeling at all. A few children chattered and pointed.
“Great, great stuff,” Beevers said.
CHAMBER OF BOULDERS, read a plaque before the first scene. THE FIRST COURT. From between the halves of a giant slablike boulder protruded the heads, legs, trunks, arms of people eternally crushed to death. Claw-footed demons in robes pulled screeching children toward the boulder.
In the SECOND COURT, horned devils pierced sinners with huge pronged forks and held them over flames. Another demon ripped the stomach and intestines from an agonized man. Others hurled children into a long pool of blood.
A blue demon sliced off the tongue of a man tied to a stake.
Poole wandered along the path between the exhibits, hearing Harry Beevers’ camera clicking, clicking away.
Grinning devils cut women in half, sliced men into sections, boiled screaming sinners in vats of oil, grilled them against red hot pillars.…
Conscious—nearly conscious—of another memory hidden beneath this one, Poole found himself remembering the emergency ward where during his internship he had spent too much time tying blood vessels and cleaning wounds, listening to screams and moans and curses, attending to people with their faces cut to pieces by knives or windshields, people who had nearly killed themselves with drugs …
… blood everywhere, blood on the concrete slab, blood on the rocks, severed arms and legs on the floor, naked men hung split open by the knives sprouting from an evil tree …
“Clean out of my eyesight, man,” Poole heard Conor say. “Hey, Mikey, these guys really believed in survival and fitness, huh?” Survival and fitness? He realized that Conor meant survival of the fittest.
Why did Beevers want pictures of this stuff?
He heard the screaming of a long-dead soldier named Cal Hill and heard Dengler’s funny, snide Midwestern voice saying
Dengler was right, God did all things simultaneously.
Every day of those months, Poole had forced himself to go to work. He had forced himself out of bed, into the drizzle of the shower, pulled himself into his clothes, grimly started his car, struggled into his scrub suit in a depression almost too total to be seen. He had gone for days without speaking to anyone. Judy had attributed his gloom, silence, and buried rage to the stresses and miseries of the emergency room, to the presence of people dying literally under his hand, to the abuse pouring out of everyone around him.…
Sweating in the cool shade of the plaster cave, Poole moved a few paces along. A woman wearing the white hide of a rabbit on her back and a man covered by a pig’s coarse hide knelt before an imperious judge. Poole remembered the rabbit Ernie’s mild beautiful fearful eyes. Other figures busied themselves around them. A monster aimed a spear, a scribe wrote on an eternal scroll. Almost exactly a year later, during his pediatric residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Poole had finally understood.
And here it was again, that place, in a plaster brain on top of a hill in Singapore.The Tenth CourtFor human souls destined to be reborn as a beast and other lower forms of life, they are provided by the court with the necessary coverings such as fur, hide, feathers, or scales before entering the whirlpool of fate, in order that the eternal souls may take a definite shape.
