Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  There’s the aneurysm, big and ripe, ready to pop. Another few days and it might have ruptured, poof! and no more Genghis Mao. The Chairman and Mangu might have shared the same funeral, come Saturday, if Shadrach hadn’t felt odd twitterings in the circulatory-system sensors and correctly guessed their import. So I have saved the Khan’s life, not for the first time and he is once more restored to perfect health. Fine. Fine. May he live five hundred years, and may I be his physician always!

  16

  Alone in his office, ruminating over his medical treasures, his books and old instruments and now this bit of bottled aorta, Shadrach feels safe and comfortably entrenched. This Avatar disturbance will blow over. The Khan, after all, is conservative; he will cling to his own Mongol body, the well-loved and sturdy patchwork carcass, as long as he can, whatever the temptations may be for him to jump into Shadrach’s strong, young, and vital frame. So there will be no precipitous exit for Shadrach, and in the months or perhaps years ahead he can try to shift the Khan’s fantasies entirely away from Project Avatar and toward Project Talos. Which will mean aborting the researches of Nikki Crowfoot, but Shadrach can’t feel too guilty about that, all things considered.

  He gives the aorta pride of place on his shelves. Centuries from now it may be sacred, enshrined in a reliquary of ivory and platinum, and the groveling faithful will chant thanks to the sainted Shadrach Mordecai for having saved for posterity this shred of divine meat. Who knows? There is an apocryphal story that many of Genghis Mao’s original organs are preserved in some labyrinthine secret tunnel, kept in cold storage or perhaps maintained in vivo, for eventual use in cloning the Khan. Shadrach doubts this. If Genghis Mao had any serious interest in being cloned, huge budgetary appropriations would be going to support tissue-culture research, and, so far as Shadrach knows, not much is going on in that area. Or, more likely, there would already be a battalion of genetically perfect duplicates of Genghis Mao lying in suspension tanks on five or six continents, waiting to be summoned into life.

  Mordecai has often thought of writing a scientific monograph on his patient, a medical biography of Genghis Mao, a full record of the myriad transplants and implants, the infinity of surgical jugglements, that are responsible for the Khan’s longevity and perhaps for his terrifying vitality. There would be nothing in the literature to compare with it, not even Beaumont on Alexis St. Martin’s digestive tract, not even Lord Moran on Churchill: had ever there been so single-minded and long-sustained a medical effort, spanning so many decades, to keep one human being alive and well? Already the achievement verges on the miraculous, but the real miracles still lie ahead, as Genghis Mao, ageless and eternally renewed, lives on to be a hundred, a hundred ten, a hundred twenty—

  There is another, greater temptation—to write not merely a medical study but a full-scale account of Genghis Mao’s life. No biography of the Chairman exists, other than vague, sanitized publicity pamphlets, mere recitals of his political accomplishments and other exterior events, avoiding all details of his private life. It is as though the Khan has a superstitious fear of having his soul captured on paper. And so Shadrach’s impulsive fantasy: to nail the Khan in words, to pin him down with literary juju: It is one means of gaining control over the world’s most powerful man, at least in a metaphorical way.

  The trouble is, no source material is available. The computer banks of Ulan Bator are gorged with intimate data about every human being alive—except Genghis Mao. Press the right button and platoons of facts march forth—but none about Genghis Mao. The facts of his life are unknown and may be unknowable, beyond the most elementary public milestones, his promulgation of the philosophy of centripetal depolarization, his founding of the PRC, his election to the Chairmanship. All the rest has been suppressed, even obliterated. When was he born? In what obscure village? What was his childhood like, what were his boyhood ambitions? What was his original name, in the old People’s Republic days before he proclaimed himself to be Genghis Mao? What was the early course of his career? What sort of education did he have? Did he ever travel abroad? Was he ever married? A father? Yes, that’s a good question—are there, somewhere in Mongolia, middle-aged men and women who are in fact the blood children of Genghis Mao, and, if so, do they know who their father is? No one can answer these questions. No one can answer any questions about Genghis Mao except with hearsay, apocrypha, and myth. He has very carefully covered his traces, so carefully that the utter success of the attempt at total concealment argues a kind of madness.

  But is anyone, even Genghis Mao, really willing to expunge from the world all traces of his private self? Criminals are said to return compulsively to the scene of the crime; possibly those who seek to shroud themselves in mystery tend also to undo their own mystifications by burying, for history’s sake, a full account of all they have tried to hide. Is there no place where Genghis Mao has secreted a concealed record of everything he has kept from the knowledge of his subjects? Say, a diary, an intimate and revealing diary, a repository for the essence of Genghis Mao’s masked soul. Shadrach imagines himself stumbling across such a document among the Khan’s effects—a single billion-bit bubble-chip, smaller than a fingertip, on which is implanted the raw red stuff of Genghis Mao’s life, his confessions, his unvarnished memoirs, out of which the faithful doctor Shadrach Mordecai will construct the first and only true account of the strange and sinister man who came to dominate the dying civilization of the early twenty-first century.

  Of course there is no such diary. Ordinary thieves and felons may compulsively jeopardize their own safety, but Shadrach knows Genghis Mao well enough to realize that if he wants to live in secrecy, he will leave no hidden memoirs around for others to find. The private Genghis Mao is just as secretive as the public one: open one empty box and another, even more empty, lies within. No matter. In his fantasy role as the biographer of Genghis Mao, Shadrach will fantasize the Khan’s memoirs as well, inventing the source material that Genghis Mao has neglected to provide. He closes his eyes. He lets his imagination slip free of the leash. Recreates the diary of the Khan within the crucible of his own throbbing brain.

  November 11, 2010.

  My birthday. Genghis Mao is eighty-five today. No. No. Genghis Mao is—what—twenty years old? About that. It’s Dashiyin Choijamste who is eighty-five today. Dashiyin Choijamste, whom I carry about within me like an internal twin. Who remembers him, that fat little babe in his proud father’s arms? So long ago, in the village of Dalan-Dzadagad on a snowy night in 1925. That’s down in the province of Southern Gobi, Dalan-Dzadagad. I haven’t been there in fifteen years. My birthplace, but who knows that? Who knows anything? I know. Dashiyin Choijamste is eighty-five today. How many others are still alive, of those born on 11 November 1925? Not many, no. And those who remain are ancient doddering wrecks. Whereas I am still in my prime, I Dashiyin Choijamste of Dalan-Dzadagad, son of Yumzhaghiyin Choijamste, director of the camel-breeding station at Bogdo-Goom. I Genghis Mao. I feel strong today, oh, yes, eighty-five and robust. Not altogether because of the transplants, either. It’s heredity that does it. The good old Tatar blood. Don’t forget, you were almost seventy when the Virus War broke out, and yet not at all old, tremendous vigor, all your teeth, jet-black hair, twenty-kilometer hikes every week; you hadn’t had any transplants yet. You were still Dashiyin Choijamste then. Strange syllables, awkward now on the tongue, though that was your name for more than six decades. And I lived right through the Virus War untouched by the rot. People fell apart all around me. Sickening to behold. I didn’t go in for transplants until later, much later, natural ravages of time, eventually, but not until after the power had come to me. The power. I have attained the highest power. And now clever doctors aid my natural Tatar vigor. I might live another fifty years.

  I might live much longer than that.

  Do I remember my childhood? How much snow piles up in eighty-five years! I think I can see my father’s face, lean like mine, strong eyebrows, strong cheekbones. Yumzhaghiyin Choi
jamste of the camel-breeding station at Bogdo-Goom, Hero of the Order of Lenin, later. Wounded at the battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, afterward third secretary of the Agricultural Agency—see, Father, I remember, I remember! The father of Genghis Mao killed in 1948 in a plane crash, between Moscow and Ulan Bator, coming home from a wheat conference. Those miserable Soviet jets, forever falling from the sky. Or was it a jet? So long ago: The jets were already in service then, weren’t they, the Ilyushins, the Tupolevs? I could look it up. You are dead sixty-two years, Yumzhaghiyin Choijamste. Babies born the night your plane fell are old people now. And I am still here, Father. I am Genghis Mao. I remember you at the camel station. I am standing in new snow and my father tugs on a camel’s halter. The camel looms above me like a mountain, long homely face, rubbery lips, sweet dull eyes with undertones of subtle contempt. The camel leans toward me and its enormous tongue slurps across my cheeks, my lips. A kiss! Its sour breath. My father’s laughter. He scoops me in his arms, gives me a crushing hug. How huge he is! Bigger than the camel, to me. I am three, four years old.

  And my mother? My mother? I never knew her. Trampled by yaks in a wild snowstorm when I was an infant. I have forgotten your name, Mother. I could look it up. But where…where…?

  Shadrach pauses, reflects, reconsiders. Is it plausible? Does it have internal consistency? The tone is right, but what about the “facts”? He will test them. Shall he alter some significant details? Will that make any difference? Let’s see—

  October 17, 2012.

  My birthday. Genghis Mao is ninety-two today, though officially I am said to be a mere eighty-seven. On the other hand, some of them believe I’m well over one hundred. Meaning that I was born in 1905 or so. Can they believe that? Isn’t 1920 bad enough? Wilson, Clemenceau, Henry Ford, General Pershing, Lloyd George, Lenin, Trotsky, Sukhe Bator…men of my time. And I am still here, anno domini 2012, I, the former Namsan Gombojab, born in Sain-Shanda, youngest son of the yak-herder Khorloghiyin Gombojab, who—

  No. Changing the details is trivial. Let his original name be Choijamste, Gombojab, Ochirbal, whatever; let him have been born in 1925, 1920, 1915, even 1910; let him have spent his career in the Ministry of Defense, the Agency for Agrarian Redistribution, the Commissariat of Telecommunications; slather on any kind of factual decoration you like; none of it will make any difference. The essential patterns of the soul of Genghis Mao run deep and heavy, and they, his perceptions, his world view, are your subject, Shadrach. Not the trivia of time and place.

  May 14, 2012.

  Just two hours ago the liver transplant was finished, and here lies Genghis Mao, old and leathery, not dead yet, no, not by much; he is alert, full of energy, wide awake. I am proud of him. The unquenchable vitality of him. The insufferable resilience of him. I hail you, Genghis Mao! Ha! I feel pain in my abdomen, but it’s nothing to moan about. Pain is the signal that we live, we feel, we respond to stimuli. The heaviness that came over me when the old liver began to fail is already going. I feel my system flushing itself clean. It is as if I float two meters above my own bed. Hovering over all the beautiful machinery that pumps healing fluids into my earthly husk. How beautiful is the pain. That throb, low and to one side…boom, boom, boom, a bell tolling within old Genghis Mao, urging him on to long life. Ten thousand years to the Emperor! My clever doctors triumph again. Warhaftig, Mordecai.

  My doctors. Warhaftig is a mere machine. He bores me, but he is perfect. I love to see his hands disappear into the hole in my belly. And come forth grasping some limp red lump full of disease, throw it aside, stitch a new organ into its place. Warhaftig never fails. But he is ugly, with that flat nose, those downturned lips. Sick dead white skin. A genius, but ugly and boring, a mere machine. Was Warhaftig ever young? Crouching behind a bush to spy on the naked women bathing in a stream? Not him. Oh, no, not him. Laughing, tumbling on the grass? Warhaftig? Never!

  Shadrach is more interesting. Graceful, witty, a fine strong body, a clear cool mind. He is pleasing to look at. His black skin. I never saw a black until I was forty and a delegation from Guinea visited my department. Their shiny faces, almost purple, their dense knotty hair, their tribal robes. Dazzling white eyes, pink palms like gorillas, deep voices, strange, strange. They spoke French. Shadrach is not like those Africans except that he has the same sort of keen, serious intelligence. He is brown, not black, very tall, very American, nothing of the jungle about him. Sometimes he lectures me as if I am a child, a naughty babe. Always worrying about my health. Conscientious, he is, earnest, dedicated, boyish. He is too sane for us here. He lacks—what? Darkness, can I say that of him? Yes. Interior darkness is what he lacks: there are no demons in him. Or do I underestimate him? There must be demons in everyone, even the robot Warhaftig, even the calm and good-humored Shadrach Mordecai. He is very young. I like that. He is at least fifty years younger than I am, and yet we are contemporaries, we are both men of the present moment, both of us unknown until relatively recently, though I waited so long to become who I am and he became himself so young. He smiles well. There is nothing cynical about him yet. He has lived through the Virus War and all the ugly things that followed and yet he is tranquil, he has faith in the future, he thinks only of healing people. He would heal those who enslaved his ancestors, even. Whereas I would avenge myself against the oppressors a thousand times over; but then, I am of Tatar stock, and we are fierce, we are Gobi wolves, while he is the child of placid jungle farmers. Every morning he goes into Surveillance Vector One and stares at the rotting people all over the world. Thinks I don’t know. I watch him watching. His lean mobile face, his sad intelligent eyes. He feels such sorrow for the rotting ones. A man of compassion. Childlike. Not saintly, but he has the stuff of martyrs in him.

  January 23, 2012.

  The Committee in plenary session. Horthy, Labile, Ionigylakis, Eyuboglu, Lapostolle, Farinosa, Parlator, Blount. All the finest bureaucrats. Drone, drone, drone, and I listened, not listening, to it all. They are machines. The Committee itself is a machine which I have constructed, a delicate and useless mechanism, like a clock without hands. When I die it will fall apart, if I die when I die. I allowed Mangu to preside. Bit by bit I ease him into the pretense of responsibility, the shadow of authority. He is fascinated by that mob of dreary bureaucrats, those apparatchiks, as a boy is fascinated by the buzzing of dung-flies, and never mind the dung. Was this what I had in mind when I seized the reins of the world, that I would father upon it a Permanent Revolutionary Committee of dung-flies? Revolutionaries! Lapostolle sleeps; Farinosa longs for Karakorum and sits twitching his long nose; Ionigylakis’s belly rumbles. I should have named more Mongols to the Committee; these white foreigners have no fire. But I need my Mongols elsewhere. I should not let them turn into drones. Snore, snore, snore! It snows again today. I could slip from the Committee room, out of the building, secretly into the snow, lie in it, roll in it, throw handfuls in the air. Summon a horse and ride all night, no saddle, hooves silent on the whiteness, man and beast crossing the steppe without a pause, crust of bread for me, a goatskin full of airag to gulp along the way—aye, I’m still a boy, I who am so ancient, and they are old men! But of course Shadrach would forbid it. I rule the world, he rules me. What if I insisted? Must I endure these droning flies when there is fresh snow on the Gobi? You can replace a crumbled kidney, I will tell him; surely you can repair an old man’s frostbit nose. Yes. Yes. I will go. I will. I must escape from this boredom.

  Is this what I had in mind when I seized the reins?

  What did I have in mind? Did I have anything in mind, except that everything was falling apart, and it was my task to hold it together? I think that was it. The world had descended into chaos. How I abhor disorder! Such turmoil, such confusion: the dying people, the dead nations, hordes of wild men sweeping across the land, nothing simple, all simplicity gone from the world. I love simplicity, a neatly organized structure, harmonious and satisfying, one nation, one government, one code of laws, everything one, onward to the hor
izon, I was seventy-three years old, and strong. The world was millions of years old, and weak. I could not bear the chaos. I think all those who have ruled the world were basically haters of chaos rather than mere lovers of power. Napoleon, Attila, Alexander, great Genghis, even poor crazy Hitler, all of them wanted things to be neat, to be simple, they had a vision of order, that is, and saw no other way to attain that order except to impose it themselves upon the world. As did I. Of course, most of them eventually spawned more chaos than they were removing, and they had to be removed themselves. Hitler, for example. I have not made that mistake. To the end, I do battle against entropy, I offer myself, Genghis II Mao IV, as the symbol of oneness, the focus of worldwide energy, the crystal of simplicity. But oh, Father Genghis, these plenary sessions, this droning, these dung-flies. Father Genghis, did you have a Horthy to harangue you? Did you sit idle, dreaming of a swift horse and an icy wind, listening to a Parlator and a Blount? Oh! Oh! Was it for this that I took upon myself the chaos of the crumbling rotting world?