Among Strange Victims (36 page)

Jimmie went on talking, and Velásquez seemed to have fallen asleep, although it turned out he was listening carefully with his eyes closed. Micaela was looking at her owner (no other word occurred to Marcelo to describe the relationship between the girl and the gringo) with an unsettling mixture of submission and disdain. Marcelo listened to Jimmie and gradually understood that it was he, and not Velásquez, who had wanted them meet, and that Jimmie in some way
subjugated the people around him, crushed them with his conversation and anecdotes, reducing them to mere spectators, to supporting actors in the movie of his life. He talked about his artistic project with the conviction of a real estate agent. It was, he said, the future of art. By that he didn't mean that art would advance by following his model, but that his project thematized the future of art, or rather a vision, a foretaste of that future. To explain this he had to go back to his youth in San Francisco, after the demise of the hippie dream.

In 1975, when Jimmie was twenty, there had been a lot of talk about certain
CIA
programs related to mind control. Everyone knew all about it: these days, Hollywood most likely lives on stories like that, added the gringo. What happened was that the radicalized hippies who had been arrested for supposed communist affiliations, and then later released, talked about interrogation sessions using hypnosis and experiments with
LSD
. At first, naturally, no one had believed them; one more invention of anticapitalist paranoia. But then the affair had reached Congress, and Senator Ted Kennedy had demanded clarification. The declassified documents spoke of a group of psychiatrists recruited by the
CIA
to develop the program, utilizing hypnosis as an interrogation tool. One of these psychiatrists, maybe the most notable since his name was mentioned many times in Senator Kennedy's reports, was Dr. Francis Cameron. When the scandal broke and the guilt was, more or less randomly, apportioned, Dr. Cameron disappeared for a few years, then, in the mid-eighties, became famous for founding a private counterespionage business based on techniques related to hypnosis: E-Sight Enterprises. They offered services—pharmaceutical, technological, nutritional—to companies—Coca-Cola was even mentioned—anxious to discover if an employee had leaked information to the competition, in infringement of the confidentiality clauses in his contract. E-Sight Enterprises was a failure in financial terms, despite the free publicity given by the tabloid press, who published whole articles on the sinister Dr. Mind, as they nicknamed Cameron, in which they speculated on his pacts with secret societies. But the company had gone bankrupt, and Cameron was out of a job, so he recycled himself as a champion of alternative medicine and other emergent concepts of the New Age in San Francisco at the end of the eighties.

It was there that Jimmie came across him: just another hippie doctor—one of the old guys, burnt out on acid, who preached against the use of vaccines and examined the color of your aura for five bucks. Jimmie was in the herbal business and sold those delirious doctors piles of cacti stolen from the indigenous reservation in the south of the country. It was illegal, but his was the least of illegalities in a universe that changed paradigms every couple of weeks, with the Berlin Wall coming down and various mafias staking out generous areas of the
U.S.
criminal underworld for themselves before the government decided who their next archenemy was going to be, now that the Soviets had gone out of fashion.

Jimmie brought Dr. Mind some rare cacti and climbing plants that no other medicine man had ever ordered, and talking the matter over one afternoon in his consulting rooms in the Mission District, they had ended by exchanging confidences. Cameron took a liking to him (there was an insinuation of a homosexual relationship in the story told by Jimmie, who spoke of the man with great tenderness) and told him about E-Sight Enterprises and the years before, when he was working for the
CIA
. In the beginning, Jimmie didn't believe a word of it, although he thought he had read similar stories years before. But Cameron had kept documents from the company that explained the method used in the hypnosis (patented) and set out guidelines for the training of hypnotists specializing in counter espionage and other pleasantries.

Jimmie saw in all that a possibility for getting rich, so one night, while the parascientist was asleep, he broke into his house (or was already inside; the anecdote didn't make this clear), stole the papers, plus three thousand dollars in bills, and spent six erratic weeks driving to Guatemala (he stopped off here and there), never again to return to San Francisco.

The narrative flow of his flight was uneven; he amused himself for several minutes telling, with a wealth of detail, what he had eaten in a certain wayside restaurant in Chiapas, then dispatched a couple of years of his life in a single blow with a vague explanation of the profession (“attack-dog trainer”) he had taken up during this interval. Marcelo thought, in the end, it was the story of an obsession that, like a hurricane, returned periodically and departed as
violently as it had arrived. Jimmie had come across hypnotism in a moment of desperation, just when he thought his life might consist of stealing cacti from the Indians for five more years and then dying of a heart attack brought on by the abuse of toxic substances. The friendship with Dr. Mind and the promise of salvation that under-laid his conspiratorial nonsense poured down on the gringo like the bucket of meaning he needed to become fully awake.

Maybe, thought Marcelo, there were some E-Sight documents, stolen by Jimmie, that described, in broad outline, the process of hypnosis. Although it was more likely, from his viewpoint, that the gringo had fled his country for a more common reason: pursued by the law or the ghost of a love affair drugs had snatched from him. The point was not the truth of the story, but the pell-mell way Jimmie told it and the delirious look in his eyes. A deeper truth could be perceived in these outward expressions. And finally, wasn't he himself, Marcelo, very similar in this sense? A man intermittently gnawed by trivial recurrences, a researcher of lives constructed on the knife edge of lies, an imposter convinced of his false story. If he were, for a moment, to strip Jimmie of his most superficial layer, to draw back the curtains of his eccentricity and his adaptation to the stereotype of a Californian in love with drugs and the Third World, what was left was not so different from what Marcelo himself hid under the dermis of sophistication and behind the shield of arrogance. Of course, looking at the matter clearly, all men, stripped of a precise number of superficial attributes, are essentially the same, in the way that the centers of all onions look alike, and what one has deep inside is essentially boring: superimposed layers of tissue bathed in blood, a few entrenched fears, urine, shit, desperation in the face of death. Only in the way these elements articulate with the external conditions—material, political, economic, climatic—do men acquire true interest as objects of study. There is nothing in the noumenon that allows us to concern ourselves with the next guy.

Marcelo strayed off into these vain considerations of a philosophical nature, but in the meanwhile, out there, in the world of material determinants, Jimmie continued talking like a street vendor with echolalia. His story had reached the vicinity of the present, and he was having a fine time discoursing on his artistic vocation
and the need to use hypnosis for the good of the cultural world, now barren due to a handful of hypocrites who had betrayed the romantic spirit of art through their cold, financial calculation. In short, Jimmie was spitting out the traditional megalomaniacal rant of all those who propose to do something radically new (that idea gave Marcelo a warm feeling).

Some months before, at the kiosk in the center of Los Girasoles, Jimmie had bought the tabloid he read religiously every Sunday. In a poorly written article, he had discovered that Dr. Mind was dead, and for that reason, he finally, after years of waiting, felt free to apply the
CIA
and E-Sight techniques of hypnosis for his own benefit. He had already made a few experiments, hypnotizing Central American prostitutes and queers garnered from the streets during his years of bumming about. Any mistake in the technique and the patient would wake up in the middle of the session, screaming and attempting to scratch his eyes out, but Jimmie had persevered until he had polished every detail and could now put even the most reluctant subjects into a trance. Once, he said, he had hypnotized a dog in Ciudad Juárez.

At some point in this hazardous form of amusement, Jimmie had, however, realized that Dr. Cameron's method had certain applications unforeseen by its creator: doors that opened in the middle of the hypnosis that only an experienced therapist could enter without leaving his patient an idiot. Tunnels to unknown regions of the mind that Dr. Cameron had overlooked, concerned as he was with dragging a clumsy confession from a poor student or, later, from an employee who had attempted to take early retirement by selling a couple of formulae to the highest bidder. Jimmie's ambitions were more expansive. He didn't give a shit about the superficial layers of the consciousness, he said. What he was interested in was diving deeper, immersing himself in the gloomy depths of the frontal lobe.

At this point in the story, Jimmie's voice became more serious. Even Micaela, usually so impassive, looked on edge, like a child waiting for the moment of opening the presents at a party. Velásquez had emerged from his profound meditation and, although he already knew the story, was staring spellbound at Jimmie. Marcelo Valente, trained in the toughest schools of philosophical reason, resisted the
effects of the story, but didn't deny the charm of the narrative, to which the gringo's accent added an organic contribution.

The dramatic pause gave Jimmie the opportunity to serve another round of tequilas. Micaela continued to take timid sips from her can of beer, sitting on the floor on her pillows. Marcelo Valente glanced at her and for the first time understood her beauty. She wasn't a child of eighteen; she was a very old woman, with the eyes of one who has seen things go up in flames too many times; she had regressed to her physiological age, thought Marcelo, from some unlikely place.

After downing his tequila in two swigs, Jimmie took up his narrative. Memory, he said, didn't have a linear structure, as we used to imagine. Within it, all the images from our past were superimposed in a chaotic, random manner. The scenes shuffled together there were not the sediment of time but instantaneous constructions that could take in elements from any lived moment. Sometimes, said Jimmie, during a session of hypnosis, the patient's images of a memory didn't correspond to any previous lived experience. Among the family photos of a trip to the beach, a strange element would timidly sneak in, one that didn't correspond to that or any other memory. They generally appeared in the form of an object—objects are traitorous: a piece of plastic, the function of which is hard to explain, or a gleaming white machine surrounded by rust. Jimmie termed those strange elements that appeared during hypnosis, falsifying the memories, “hypnotic fetishes.” And he had discovered, as he went on to add, that hypnotic fetishes were not imaginary constructions but anticipated future scenes that we would perhaps never see: kitchen appliances, toys our children or grandchildren would use quite naturally some Thursday morning, or multisensory sculptures that would make the visitors to future art galleries shudder. If, during the hypnosis, you managed to concentrate on those fetishes, you could learn about those future art forms and carry them into the present. That was, to cut a long story short, the project.

Marcelo, whose pragmatism had waned during his stay in Mexico and, in particular, during his recent conversations with Rodrigo, had listened with respect to the anecdotal part of Jimmie's monologue: the intrigues with the
CIA
, the eighties, the counterespionage business, the financial disaster, the birth of the New Age, the illegal
deals, the homosexual relationship between the budding fugitive from justice and the discredited psychiatrist, the betrayal and the flight south, the experiments with hypnosis. He adored the story. He had even thought, during a moment of distraction while Jimmie was rattling on, that he had to find a way to put some of it into his book, to relate it somehow with Foret's months in Mexico and his disappearance. They'd lap this up in Madrid, he thought. They'd no longer see him as an academic with a talent for taking full advantage of the perks of the office, but as an authentic researcher of the passions of the soul, an explorer of the depths of consciousness who had, in the New World, discovered a parallel logic capable of renewing the stagnant thought of Western philosophy through the unlikely terrain of the aesthetics of madness. These were the delusions of grandeur he childishly gave himself up to from time to time on discovering, for example, an author no one had read. The idea of being a pioneer in some subject, of finding a bundle of yellowing papers in some provincial library that would position him as the man who was capable of rescuing some forgotten aspect of philosophical thought, stirred him to the core of his being. Shining in the pedestrian grayness of academia was such a complicated enterprise that he had dreams of himself as the Christ who would open the gates of a new conception of the world, and then all those miserable wretches would recognize his true worth.

Obviously, there was one aspect of Jimmie's narrative that he was uneasy about: it was absolute nonsense. The belief that one could secretly look into a future art gallery to anticipate its content by a hundred years was enough to have the poor gringo locked away for life. He decided, nevertheless, to humor him and then later, when he got Velásquez alone, sound out the extent of Jimmie's derangement.

Micaela stood up and went to fetch a glass from the dilapidated kitchen. Jimmie had his eyes fixed on Marcelo Valente, who was attempting to avoid the question that would inevitably follow.