The Tomato Binder

 

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

— Czesław Miłosz, “A Song on the End of the World” (1944)

I am, in the grand scheme of things, an unremarkable person. I do not rank among the many heads of state, persons of influence, or intellectuals who designed this place, operate it, or who, for motives that are well above my ability to comprehend, see fit to visit this reclusive prison on occasion. The professional decisions that are my remit are few and relatively simple: compare the personal data of visitors against a list in the computer system, press a button to allow them in, or, as situations have arisen on a handful of occasions over the past seventeen years of my employment at this institution, alert superiors to the arrival of people whose names do not figure on the said list. Allow people in, keep people out. That is, in a nutshell, the nature of my employment.

And yet, before I could join the handful of employees who guard this place, various background checks had been necessary. For it is no regular prison within whose sacred walls I exercise my limited powers. It is the holy of holies, and in its bosom, locked away from a very young age until expiration, lies a platoon of the world’s most dangerous men and women, people who, on a whim, could literally end life on earth as we know it. This much I have learned over the years, picking bits of information here and there, storing away the casual remarks uttered by the eminent visitors to this madhouse and, increasingly, reading about it in the news. Admittedly I may also, every once and then and more frequently in recent months, have perused a classified document left carelessly on a desk, this when, for a few hours’ overtime, I have filled in as an overnight security guard within the building itself, as opposed to its outer rim, which is the territory of my regular job. In recent years, with security dwindling, such encounters with matters most secret have become more and more frequent, and more recently security have not even bothered to affix one of their pink stickers to warn employees that they have committed a security violation.

You see, the place is supposed to be most highly classified, built upon nothing in the vast fields of the Nevada desert. And yet, over time secrecy has been supplanted by curiosity, then curiosity by trendiness, and eventually trendiness by forgetfulness about the reason why this place was erected in the first place, and why its inhabitants had been locked away for eternity. That is human nature. One does not need an advanced degree from an Ivy League university to know that humankind acclimatizes. The longer a dreaded occurrence has failed to manifest itself, the more trivial it becomes. Inevitability becomes likelihood; over time, likelihood becomes mere statistics, then a rapidly fading memory. Government institutions worldwide have this ladder of contingency which is based on the likelihood that something will happen. When it has not happened for a while, budgets flitter away, institutions catch a case of amnesia, and the world carries on in blissful ignorance.

After several frustrated attempts to warn people of the rough beast, if I may borrow from an overused image, that, if awakened, will surely slouch towards Betlehem—and Washington, Berlin, Beijing, London and New Delhi—to be born, and not wanting my children to inhabit a defunct world, I am now inhabited by a growing compulsion to take action. It will be drastic, and this letter is an unexceptional man’s attempt to explain to posterity why I committed this act. History will judge me harshly, but what must be done must be done. I have accumulated enough chemicals to build a device that will bring this place down. Here is why. 

* * *

The euphemistically named Alfred A. Bix Institute was built in the 1960s as part of a U.N.-funded program to hold in captivity the world’s most dangerous individuals. In the strictest sense of the word, those are not criminals, as they have not committed any crime, and hence it was deemed immoral to incarcerate them alongside your run-of-the-mill serial killer, child molester or rapist. Their confinement, which in most cases began when the subjects were still in infancy, is due instead to the potential each and every one of them has to cause unimaginable damage to our very existence. I do not believe anyone knows with certainty where that potential comes from, but through various tests, the curse could be identified in the early stages of one’s life. Alarmed by a series of small-scale disasters in various corners of the world, the U.N. and a number of its constituent governments built a surveillance network to catch the individuals in question and rendition them to the their eternal abode in the Nevada desert. The above-named Alfred A. Bix, lanky, red-haired and somewhat owl-looking, who did pioneering work at Yale, Harvard and Cambridge in obscure corners of the field of parapsychology, was the key architect of the capture project and, in a decision worthy of his somewhat large ego, named the building after himself.

The subjects were not only caught and spirited away to the U.S. against their will and without any recourse to whatever laws my have applied, but upon their arrival at Bix they were castrated and ligatured, to ensure that they could not, should the condition be somehow transferrable genetically, create similarly gifted progeny. In the months and years that followed their usually traumatic capture, the inmates were subjected to intense psychological conditioning by teams of experts; that process also involved a variety of antipsychotic drugs, sedatives and other chemicals. A number of apparatuses, uniquely adapted to each bearer, were also designed to act as a second line of defense against their instincts. For some, the device in question consisted of a metal helmet; for others, it was little boxes and a series of wires attached to parts of the body where electroshocks are most effective. The latter would have made Pavlov proud. By the late 1980s, the wise men at the U.N. were confident that they had caught, and neutralized, every single suspect. Why they concluded that no other cases, which they may have missed, were possible was never explained. 

Regardless, Dr. Bix died soon afterwards, bitten by a venomous snake in a low-land swamp of Papua New Guinea, and that was the end of his involvement in our tale.

At this point the reader must be tempted to ask, What awful curse afflicts the men and women who were so callously plucked and condemned to a lifetime in confinement? The answer is, they are the Few Dozen Horsemen (and Women, to be perfectly fair to both sexes) of the Apocalypse. There is, I am afraid, no more suitable way to describe them. Hidden within each one of them is a germ of destruction which, if allowed to grow, would unleash unspeakable ills upon our world. As the U.N. investigators discovered over time, each one of the young men and women thus afflicted needed a trigger for the forces within them to be released. Luckily for all of us alive today, the suspects were, with a few costly exceptions, caught when they were still infants and therefore when they powers had yet to develop to the full extent of their destructiveness. 

One of the exceptions, which did not show up on the network’s radar until it was too late, was a young girl born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1972. From the age of two, family members and, later on, schoolmates had discovered that whenever little Oleksandra came in contact with batteries, strange things happened with nearby light sockets and gas turbines. And despite their best attempts to keep here away from such energy sources, little Oleksandra would eventually always succeed in finding batteries. By the time she turned fourteen, the teenage girl had graduated to car batteries and it was too late. On April 26, 1986, as she grabbed a rusty car battery stored in a neighbor’s garage in Pripyat, the No. 4 nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant suffered a catastrophic failure. Days later, as Ukrainian and Soviet officials were still lying to the world about what had transpired at Chernobyl, U.N. officials slipped into the condemned city and whisked little Oleksandra away. According to Bix and his experts, left unchecked, such powers would in full adulthood have permitted Oleksandra to spark off a nuclear exchange between nations and, with that, nuclear winter and the extinction of nearly all life on earth—humans most certainly. Through years of treatment and heavy dosage of barbiturates, Miss Oleksandra forget about her proclivity towards batteries, and to be safe, no energy sources are to be found in her vicinity. 

In a profile in Time a few years ago, when the world began to learn more about the Bix brood, I learned that Miss Oleksandra had become known within the Institute for her colorful gouache paintings of flowers in full bloom. Some of those gaudy creations graced the walls in the reception area of the Institute. Even before I came upon the profile in Time, I had for some reason always thought of them as “bursting.”    

The other inmates at the Bix Institute came similarly equipped with the ability to wreak havoc. But where Miss Oleksandra and her batteries risked vaporizing the human race in a radioactive cloud, others, each with their own idiosyncratic triggers, would conjure cataclysmic tsunamis (bathtub plugs), devastating hurricanes and typhoons (paper fans) or earthquakes (salt shakers); one would inspire world leaders to launch genocidal wars (any sharp object), another would inspire large-scale terrorist attacks (religious objects, chiefly a Quran one pristine September morning in 2001), yet others could turn the earth’s atmosphere into an uninhabitable hellish cauldron (matches), unleash pestilence (dead animals, rabbits, squirrels and cats mostly), draught (sodium), or a new Ice Age (antifreeze, ironically); one could even attract an alien invasion (the give-away before this child was caught by the U.N. near Chongqing was his infatuation with china—saucers, to be more precise; strange lights would appear in the skies above the People’s Republic whenever little Bingwen fulfilled his desire—and defied his mother’s wrath—to play with the family tea set).  

All are adults now. The last addition to the group of residents at the Bix Institute, a woman from Peru with the ability to crush continents with a million-tonne meteorite (marbles), was dragged in on Christmas Eve, 1988.   

It is a litany of horrors—granted, of horrors unrealized—and the reason for that curse, for all that potential, lies with a source unknown. I do not blame them, all those drugged up, miserable occupants at the madhouse, for they know not what they would do should we permit them to act on their hidden impulses. I blame instead the millions of people in the other madhouse, the one that exists outside the walls of the Bix Institute. And it is because of the madmen and madwomen on the outside, the occupants in the political stratosphere in Washington, D.C., London, Beijing, Paris, Geneva and New York, the feature writers, the PR firms, film crews, the monetizers and celebrities, the U.N. and Bix officials installed by amnesia—it is because of them that I must contrive to put an end to the poor souls at Bix. We have turned the seven-year-old, then the forty-seven-year-old man who could, by touching a single object, kill tens of millions, into an object to flirt with; to film, to write about, and to tempt. We have removed the helmets, unplugged the electrodes, unlocked the rooms and reduced the dosage. And then we flocked to the Institute with our cameras, wagging across a glass window to the impassive Horsemen glancing back with beady, uncomprehending eyes, the very objects which could spark off terminal mass destruction. What for? Just for the thrill of it. Extreme sport, with millions on the edge of a cliff. The madness is the forgetfulness, the ease with which we discard that which not so long ago constituted an existential threat. Case in point: after the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars on homeland security and trillions waging war on enemies abroad, the ease with which I have procured the ingredients necessary to build my destructive device is nothing short of astounding. Rather than blow up the place, I could also, had I wanted, have built a small army, armed with assault rifles and handguns worthy of a small army, to storm the Bix Institute and kill everybody in it several times over. We are mad—we kill each other, we knowingly kill Nature around us, not because we do not know but because we choose to forget. We choose to deny, against all the evidence. We have convinced ourselves that the inevitable can be avoided. In the face of inaction, one inevitability begets another; before it is too late, one has little choice but to take pre-emptive action, and soon I will act upon that necessity. 

I have three children, aged eleven, nine and six. I do not want the Horsemen, or their cousin the Beast, to slouch anywhere into their world. Our culture has trivialized the deadly serious. The instantaneity of everything, the spectacle at our fingertips, has rendered everything harmless, virtual, distant, disconnected. We have carpet-bombed ourselves with sensationalism, so much so that the sensational has become mundane. We have become as conditioned as the drug-addled residents at the Bix Institute; annihilation stares us in the face, yet we choose to ignore it. 

It was Pynchon, I believe, who wrote about Londoners who had convinced themselves during the Blitz that the Nazi rockets could not hit the same spot more than once; and it was Waugh, if memory serves, who wrote about the same residents, in the same city, who prayed for the rockets to fall on the house next door rather than theirs. We have become deluded. We are mad. We defy gravity at our own peril. We have been playing Russian Roulette for decades, and so far we’ve not succeeded in killing each and every one of us. But all it takes is once—one chamber with the bullet in, and that’s it, the end. Before we hit that pregnant chamber, I will take action. Forgive me, as I bind my tomatoes.

* * *

Late one evening in April, as a planet-wide invisible killer threatened millions, Arthur Bellows, 39, security guard on night duty at the Alfred A. Bix Institute in the Nevada desert, detonated a large homemade bomb, killing everybody. Bellows himself remains unaccounted for. The FBI is still investigating the reasons behind this senseless act of terrorism.