One Night in Copan Read online

  - What abstract reasoning inspires a “grand architect” to remain unmoved by sorrow and calamity and the ceaseless suffering of his own blueprint? What justifies such dispassion?

  - What Alpha and Omega unleashes scourges that enfeeble, jeopardize and often destroy its own masterwork?

  Until irrevocable proof of “Intelligent Design” is put forth (I’m not holding my breath) the concept will more likely be viewed as a clever stratagem cooked up by a new generation of snake-oil marketers who hijack and exploit hopelessly bewildered spirits and subvert them with falsehoods that only blind faith can ever legitimize. ID is not just an alternate theory explaining the advent of “God’s” most defective creation. It’s a dangerous eccentricity concocted to exact faith by psychological extortion.

  When people need to believe in something, they cease to think.

  As for me, I’m never more certain of my origins than when I look into the soulful eyes of a great ape. I find comfort and a sense of innocence -- long since lost -- in this genesis. It is when I look at myself and examine my fellow Homo sapiens that I worry about the future of the human race. This is one faulty product that can never be recalled.

  DREAMFARER (p. 37).

  Over the course of the next few decades, NASA plans to send humans back to the Moon, then on to Mars and beyond. In preparation for these perilous, long -- possibly one-way odysseys -- psychologists are exploring the challenges astronauts will face during these demanding missions. Lessons learned from the past, research in extreme environments, including micro-gravity and high radioactivity, training, conditioning, and countermeasures for psychological stress are some of the things the space agency is in the process of addressing.

  Longer missions expose astronauts to immense psychological pressures, depression and interpersonal conflicts as they adjust to being so far away from Earth. Astronauts have been reluctant to admit to mission-related mental or behavioral problems for fear of being grounded. Because behavioral problems can interfere with the success of a mission -- if not doom it -- future astronauts must learn to detect, assess and manage the effects of loneliness, homesickness, claustrophobia and depression. On multi-crew sorties, they must avoid or swiftly resolve interpersonal conflicts. They might die before they ever reach their destination, or perish after they arrive, of exposure, hunger, thirst, boredom, a suffocating longing for Mother Earth and, quite possibly, madness.

  THE VAMPIRE STATE (p. 41).

  An estimated 100 million children live and often die on city streets around the globe. Victims of dysfunctional families, swept under the rug of political chaos, social turmoil and faltering economies, street kids are the first casualties of a world in disarray. The price they pay for the follies of society is incalculable: hunger, homelessness, harassment, beatings, sexual exploitation, rape, social alienation, arrest without warrant and incarceration without benefit of trial, often in the company of hardened adult felons where the abuse continues. They live in constant fear. Because they often turn to petty crime to survive, use drugs to mitigate the harsh reality of their hostile environment, they are viewed as “vermin.” This perception, promoted by the public and exploited by openly belligerent social conservatives, has helped unleash a tide of violence against the world’s fastest growing and most vulnerable minority: homeless minors. It is this disquieting and ongoing rush to infanticide, often accommodated by agents of the state and self-appointed enforcers that this dystopia endeavors to expose.

  A HARVEST OF SORROWS (p. 45).

  Based largely on actual events and personal observations, this story tells about the disenfranchised, the castaways, vagabonds, beggars, drifters, the homeless and the mad, “that passively rotting mass” [Karl Marx] that teems unseen and unheard in the shadows, the shantytowns, the slums that adjoin affluent neighborhoods. As poverty spreads, social scientists are busy splitting hypothetical hair: Is the proliferation of the underclass the result of being poor? Or is being poor the predictable aftermath of a political system that has turned the economy into a “betting parlor,” destroyed millions of jobs and devastated household incomes? Although some experts concede that the existence of an underclass is the result of capitalism’s exploitative structure, a scheme that values profits over well-being, they seldom address the phenomenon in other than economic terms. Somehow, the obvious -- government ineptitude, greed, corruption, legal loopholes that allow for the greatest concentration of wealth to remain in the hands of a few, indifference, emphasis on the prosperity of private interests at the expense of the many, all the dynamics that ensure the persistent survival and proliferation of the underclass -- elude them.

  The wider premise of this story, which is inspired by real events, is that there can be no underclass without privileged elites and that, in a very real sense, ownership is theft. The continued trivializing, harassment and silencing of their poor -- by assassination if necessary -- as is the unwritten strategy of two Central American states where I worked for 12 years, will one day trigger an insurrection. Predictably, unaccustomed to being flouted, engrossed in the preservation of its national interests and prestige, the U.S., the self-appointed “leader of the free world” will swiftly intervene, send in the Marines, restore the plutocrats, rearm the constabularies and double foreign aid, not a cent of which will ever go to restore the dignity and hope of an ever-growing underclass.

  THE FOOT FETISH (p. 59).

  According to the New Testament (John 6:53-55) Jesus is alleged to have proclaimed:

  “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, has eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”

  Two thousand years later, the great Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, declared:

  “I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.”

  Shades of Soylent Green! Cannibalism, more precisely anthropophagy, is an ancient culinary option that, judging from historical accounts and intermittent news reports, is far from being outmoded. There is compelling evidence that our Neanderthal, Proto-Neolithic and Neolithic forebears indulged in human flesh. Hunger may have driven the first act of cannibalism but, in time, the consumption of human meat, initially an acquired taste, took on socio-cultural dimensions. In addition to providing an extra source of protein, cannibalism -- or the threat of it -- also acted as a deterrent in intertribal conflicts. In some societies, eating one’s enemies was supposed to endow the victors with the strength and wisdom of the vanquished.

  Contested accusations of ritual cannibalism have been leveled against the 12th century Anasazi culture in the southwest U.S. and the Minoans in Crete. There is anecdotal evidence of cannibalism having been widespread in 16th century Angola, Cameroon and Congo; in Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru; among the Carib of the Lesser Antilles, as well as in remote areas of the Pacific, including Papua-New Guinea, the Marquises Islands of Polynesia and New Zealand.

  For all its melodramatic character, THE FOOT FETISH was inspired by a real event and taken to its most odious extreme.

  Food was scarce during the German occupation of France, which I witnessed, but members of the Resistance and their families seldom wanted. Farmers contributed generously and my father, a physician, received potatoes, leeks, onions, eggs and an occasional wedge of cheese in lieu of honorarium whenever he delivered a baby or tended to sick or wounded comrades. Fresh meat was more difficult to obtain due in part to a shortage of livestock. Hunting was discouraged because shooting guns invariably drew the Germans’ attention.

  Despite these restrictions, we could count on our weekly allotment: five hundred grams of beef or horsemeat. My mother would remove the meat from the coarse brown paper wrappings, assess freshness by color and smell
, and cook it immediately. One day, the deliveryman brought a piece of meat that was unlike any other my mother had ever seen. Pinkish rather than red, the flesh had an unfamiliar consistency and appearance. Worse, it emitted an indescribable pungency and was adorned on one side with a patch of soft, short flaxen hair. Suspicious, my mother asked the man to wait and summoned my father.

  “Look at this. What is it?”

  My father exploded. It’s not what but who!” He retched. My mother ran out of the house screaming.

  The deliveryman turned white and nearly fainted. “What do you mean, who,” he asked, his eyes big with outrage and disbelief.

  “This is part of a human thigh,” my father bellowed. “Where did you get it?”

  The man mentioned a name.

  “Find out where it came from. I demand an answer next time I see you, you understand? Take this monstrosity with you and bury it.”

  The facts, as best as I can reconstruct them, are as follows: A poacher had shot and killed a German soldier, cut up usable parts of his body, and distributed them through the underground food network. It is likely that some less enlightened -- or less finicky -- end-users dined on their gruesome ration that week.

  As James Carroll writes in Jerusalem, Jerusalem, “Where accounted for in terms of mimetic rivalry, the law of the jungle, vestigial instincts of the hunt … or the mere lust for revenge, Homo sapiens, long after living solely by the hunt, found itself still to be at the mercy of the urge to kill.” Perhaps killing is a form of inhibited cannibalism.

  Cannibalism is a chilling reminder of our humble and primitive origins in the animal kingdom. To cannibals -- Andrei Chikatilo, Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish and Ed Gein among the most infamous -- human flesh is as appetizing as filet mignon, leg of lamb, shrimp scampi or duck à l’orange. It may be more the result of nurturing, than instinct, that we deem it perfectly normal to kill and eat other animals, while refrain from devouring one-another (except metaphorically, of course, and on the battlefield).

  As Richard Routley-Silvan observes in his essay, In Defense of Cannibalism, something that is innately repugnant does not make it morally taboo. Moreover, he adds, the fact that we find cannibalism nauseating is probably the outcome of upbringing and habituation rather than an inborn aversion to human flesh.

  Bon appétit.

  ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN (p. 67).

  UFO investigators face daunting challenges. In the absence of “hard data,” say, a fragment from a UFO or the remains of a traveler from some distant galaxy, they are left with three choices: stop looking, speculate and infer, or rely solely on eyewitness accounts, which are notoriously unreliable and apt to have been dreamed up by crackpots or fabricated by jokesters with a fondness for mass-induced hysteria.

  One of the best known examples of collective panic was the 1938 “Invasion from Mars” when Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of a science-fiction drama sent thousands of listeners from coast to coast into a state of terror because they believed Martians had landed on Earth and the end of the world was at hand.

  In his 1966 analysis of the Welles broadcast, subtitled A Study in the Psychology of Panic, social scientist Hadley Cantril suggests that the anxieties of the time, the economic depression and the imminent outbreak of World War II had set the stage for the ensuing public frenzy. He examines the psychological factors that made so many people believe that the events dramatized on the radio were real, whereas others dismissed them as fiction or were astute enough to call the police and newspapers for corroboration. The believers seemed to have a “mindset,” a preconceived notion that God was going to end the world and that an invasion was imminent; or they harbored fanciful concepts about the potential of science. When they heard Welles’ masterful and chilling adaptation of the War of the Worlds, they accepted it as a validation of their own beliefs and mulishly disregarded any evidence that might disprove their apocalyptic fantasies. Others, bereft of standards of critical judgment, showed a dearth of discernment by accepting with quasi-religious fatalism what the broadcast reported as the truth.

  Cantril concludes that what these susceptible groups share are characteristic feelings of personal inadequacy and an inability to rely on their own resources to see them through the darkness of ignorance. They believe their lives and fate “are very largely dependent on some focus beyond [their] control, or hang on the whim of some supernatural being. All this adds up to an intense feeling of emotional insecurity, one which is likely to be augmented as the situation around them appears more and more threatening. [They] will be highly susceptible to suggestion when they face a situation that taxes their own meager self-reliance, and especially when their emotional security is threatened by official pronouncements such as those coming from a radio station of other public source….” -- namely a respected Honduran daily newspaper in which the bizarre and utterly fictitious events chronicled in ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN were published.

  It was a rereading of Cantril’s study that inspired the elaborate hoax.

  Fellow journalist Pablo Beltrán (not his real name) did conspire to publish the tall story I’d sent him for his amusement. An otherwise serious, melancholy man given to fits of weeping and raging outbursts of anger, Beltrán understood how this would play out among his highly religious, hopelessly superstitious compatriots. In a rare moment of impishness, switching from solemnity to frivolity, he ran two consecutive articles. I did not exaggerate the ruckus and trepidation their publication provoked. A print version of the e-mail correspondence between Beltrán and me, faithfully reproduced in the story, is now under lock and key. Beltrán, who died earlier this year at the age of seventy, took the secret of our devilishly enjoyable prank to the grave.

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAX (p. 79).

  This is a story of wanderlust and gloom, self-exile and intrigue, boredom and madness. It is also the story of an improbable, spur-of-the-moment friendship that ended like so many accidental liaisons, the casualty of distance, distraction and death.

  Some incidents were dramatized to add epic realism, or compressed to lend them the surreal hue they would eventually acquire on their own. Some names were changed because the characters’ real identity was not relevant to the narrative, or because those who spoke off the record needed to remain in the shadows. One notable exception to these necessary evasions is my late friend Max Pontifex.

  In my presence and for the ten years or so that we knew each other, Max was kind, generous, easygoing and quite open about the demons that possessed him. But he wasn’t evil. I believe that inside the Max who rankled people and abused their patience, lived an anguished adolescent trying to find his place in a world whose conventions he spurned. It is that Max to whom I pay tribute. An accurate portrait of the man must necessarily include a depiction of his darker side. It was not my intention to mythologize Max, only to commemorate his brief and tormented existence.

  Sorting fact from fancy proved laborious and frustrating. People who could have added crucial details acted with robotic reticence. They hedged, doled out trivial tidbits, gossiped or clammed up. Silence is the simplest form of disinformation. Unlike open scandal, which peaks in an orgy of finger-pointing, then dies, silence leaves a trail of inferences and a scent of putrefaction. Several acquaintances opened up on condition of anonymity. Sometimes the truth can only be bought in exchange for silence. One thing is certain: Few people were as genuinely fond of Max as I was. Some tolerated him -- from a distance. Others feared and loathed him, perhaps because he saw through their pusillanimity, their hypocrisy, their conceit, their bigotry. Others yet, among them close relatives, turned out to have known him only vaguely -- or knew him not at all. For most, Max quickly passed from reality to hyperbole.

  Max was born on September 3rd 1939, the son of Keith Overton Pontifex and Doreen Harris, both of Scottish ancestry. There are persistent rumors that Keith and Doreen were not married when Max was born. His blood relatives insist they were but Max told me they were not. For people of their standing on the islan
d, then still a British colony, a child born out of wedlock would have been quite an embarrassment. Doreen was suffering from tuberculosis when she gave birth to Max. Confined to the TB ward of a local hospital, Doreen gave up custody of her son. She died a year later. Max was soon adopted and raised as their own by a prominent and generous family who loved him, pampered him, catered to his whims, indulged his foibles and overlooked his profligacies. Why Max was not reared by members of his own clan is left to conjecture. Their rejection may explain the pent-up antipathy he felt for his blood relatives.

  After his wife’s death, Keith Sr. remarried and moved to Canada.

  Max attended a prestigious school but was soon expelled for sneaking up behind the teacher’s desk and releasing a bat under her skirt. Although he was fond of books, he never had much interest in formal studies. During “bird season,” he would leave home dressed in his school uniform, head straight to the hunter’s blind he’d erected in the swamp -- he’d nicknamed it “Vietnam” -- and where he kept an extra set of clothes. In the evening, after a day of duck hunting and daydreaming in the dense thickets that rose from the tidal shore, he’d put his uniform back on and return home.

  Max was in his twenties when he was either coerced or lured to Canada by his father, who promptly put him to work in his gas station. Max, whose way of life did not include anything remotely resembling conventional work, was unhappy pumping gas, washing windshields, changing tires and interacting with people. He did things to annoy his father, who had financed his trip, and whose dubious hospitality he was determined to erode. Once, he pumped gas into the trunk of a car and filled the tank of another with water. Accustomed to walking barefoot since childhood, Max told me how he hated having to wear shoes. He also complained of Canada’s bitter winters and stifling, sultry summers. Max missed his island life. He managed to scrape a few dollars for a one-way flight out of Canada. He kissed the ground when he landed back home.