true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
Once we were seated at the restaurant with our quart bottles of Bintang beer in front of us, the conversation began to flow and I started to form
an impression of my companions.
Dr. Heintz was, he said, a geologist with an outfit in Singapore. The year before, a survey team had found evidence of a large deposit of nickel
that straddled the border between Indonesian and Portuguese Timor. He was there to confirm their findings and to estimate the feasibility of a
mining operation. That seemed straightforward enough, although there were references to a set of instruments that could somehow determine
the true size of the deposit. I knew very little of prospecting technology, but a device that could see hundreds of feet into the ground sounded
farfetched to me.
I gently inquired about the language that I had heard them both speaking, thinking this would lead him on to discussing his wife. It turned out
to be a favorite subject of his. She was, he told
me while she merely sat and watched us both, a granddaughter of the Maharani of Maharashtra. It seemed that Heintz had been in the market
for a few hundred acres of prime Maharashtran agricultural land and the old Maharani had a parcel that she was willing to cut loose. This had
lead to Heintz meeting Rani. Before the deal was closed, it was clear that a wedding would soon follow. He waxed eloquent over the joys of
tractor farming in India, how he was really a very simple man, the joys of watching the growth of a new crop, and so on. He was quite a raver,
and I was content to let him spin it all out. It seemed that he was a kind of vice-president in charge of operations for the mining concern, a
kind of trouble shooter really. He ordered another beer and told a story about being ambushed by guerrillas during the start up of a big tin
extraction operation in northern Thailand. At the story's climax he stood and lifted his shirt to display for my edification three neat scars across
his chest. From a machine gun, he said.
"Any one of them could have killed me outright. But no! I was preserved, and the triumph of our company's project was complete."
Describing the start up of a tin mine as a triumph seemed a bit overblown to me, but it was clear that I was in the presence of one intense dude.
Hardly pausing he moved on to the time in Tanzania when he alone, bare chested and unarmed except for an axe, had strode into a crowd of
six thousand angry workers during a strike at a bauxite operation. Modest he was not, but the stories were well told and compelling. And
standards for dinner conversation in the warm tropics leave room for the self-aggrandizing traveler's tale.
Eventually he turned his attention to the company that he worked for. "FEMMI is no ordinary company, Herr McKenna, please be assured of
that. No. We are like a family. This is the source of our strength. And we have plans for the future. Very big plans." I only nodded, thinking it
best not to inform him that I considered large mining corporations the scourge of the earth. But this devotion to his corporation was no casual
matter, and he seemed unable to leave the subject alone.
"Nowhere on earth is there a more closely knit and dedicated group than are we. We are bound like comrades in arms. Each member of the
core management group is a genius in his or her own
right." He pronounced genius like "tchenius." "And why is that you must wonder? Ach, I am telling you why. It is because we, each one of us,
has known the horror of privation, the depths of despair, and the glorious feeling that comes from overcoming these things. We are united in
our triumph, Herr McKenna, and the sense of inevitable conquest of difficulty has made us invincible!" At this last word, his voice rose and
his fist descended to the flimsy table with such force that our quart bottles of Bintang jumped in reply.
Seeing my uncertain response, he continued. "You are amazed to hear this, I see. Maybe you are asking what privations, what difficulties? It is
like this: we all lived through the Hitler times and the war. Germany was nothing after the war. There was not one stone upon another in my
Berlin. In the ruins of Europe we were like cockroaches. May I tell you that the bank accounts of all the SS families were frozen. My mother,
my poor aristocratic mother, was reduced to selling paintings from our estate in order to buy potatoes to feed herself and my younger sister.
Imagine this!"
"Oh no," I thought, "Not Nazis. Is this guy telling me he was a Nazi?" I fought to get my look of horror under control, but now he was on a
roll and seemed to take no notice.
"My father was captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin. He was hung like a dog in Moscow for war crimes. Can you imagine?
Verdammen Russian schweinen talking about war crimes? For all the SS it was like that."
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