Everybody Loves Raymundo by Niko Tonks

“Sensory deprivation,” Colonel Chung says to me, “is a powerful tool. Consider this, Mr. Jones: have you ever truly been isolated from the world, left entirely without sensory input? Especially for a man like you, being cognizant of your surroundings is of paramount importance.”

Chung stops to stroke his theatrical Fu Manchu and give me a pointed look. He’s letting it soak in, letting me fill in the blanks before he hits me with his version of the terrible truth.

“The truth is, Mr. Jones, that you couldn’t deal with being deprived of your senses.” He pauses dramatically, leaning in close. “With impending doom at your doorstep, being held hostage from your senses would drive you quickly insane. It would break your mind. In fact, this is exactly what will happen, if you prove to be uncooperative.”

It’s at this point that I notice Chung is sweating. He’s got me tied up to what looks (and feels) like a medieval torture rack, heat lamps beating down on me, and he’s the one sweating. His bald head is positively glistening. I guess what they say about surplus Soviet military uniforms is true – they just don’t breathe. He continues, in a soft, menacing voice.

“Held still by restraining ropes, your eyes, nose and ears sealed shut, you will float in a sound-deadening tank of water heated to your exact skin temperature.” He pulls an ancient-looking stainless steel remote control from one of his pockets, whips around on one heel, and points it at the wall, also stainless. He toggles a switch, and the wall irises open, revealing another, smaller room in which sits what looks to me like an oversized photon torpedo from Star Trek. It even has the blue line down the side. White-coated scientists hover about the torpedo, reading dials on the walls, and noting things on tablets.

Chung turns back to me. “You have a choice, Mr. Jones. Either you tell me what I desire to know, or you will enter the chamber.” I, of course, say nothing. He continues. “If you choose not to cooperate, after only a short time you will emerge from the chamber less a man, and more an object, pliable to my demands. None of my past subjects have ever recovered.”

By this point, Chung’s incessant pausing and posturing is starting to get to me. It never used to be like this. Everyone thought this James Bond bullshit was over fifteen years ago. It started to fall out of fashion even before the Wall came down, and after, well, it was never the same. Some people lamented the loss of all those charming Soviet idiosyncrasies, bemoaned the end of their precious Cold War budgets and the paranoia that went with them, but I couldn’t have been happier. In the early and mid-nineties people seemed to be more interested in beating the answers out of you than slowly electrocuting you into submission by electric eel, and that didn’t bother me a bit.

No one could have predicted the rise of the dot com billionaire villain, though. Those crazy fucks had no idea what the hell they were doing, but that didn’t stop them from trying to blog themselves to world domination. They threw the whole equation out of whack, and brought us back into the dark ages. Personally, I blame Tomorrow Never Dies. Some might say that the Bond franchise follows trends in spy work, but I would argue that it sets them just as often. Especially with the nerdy types. Chung is a different story, but he’s been as influenced by Bond as the next guy.

Guys like Chung are the worst kind of throwback. They see themselves as the true connoisseurs of villainy. They almost always call themselves “colonel” or “general,” they all shop at the same store, and each and every one of them has their favorite method of torture. At this point, all I can do is grin and bear it. I can’t just tell Chung what he wants to know – it would get back to Langley somehow, or he might even kill me, seeing as how I was no fun anyway. Neither one of those scenarios agree with me, so my only choice is the chamber.

Of course, Chung knows all this, and so he just stands there, smiling like an idiot and stroking that stupid beard. After thirty seconds or so, I finally speak up.

“Let me get this straight, Chung. If I get in that thing, I won’t have to listen to your rambling anymore, right?”

It’s a weak excuse for a wisecrack, and I know it. It’s just been a long week, and I really don’t have the patience for this kind of thing. Chung looks vaguely offended, as if I haven’t lived up to his expectations, but he continues with the script anyway.

“Ah, the famed American arrogance. You will pay for that, Jones.”

He motions to the two bodybuilders that have been sulking in the corner ever since Chung started, and they unstrap me from the torture rack. I put up a fight but, contrary to what you may have thought, tuxedos don’t really let you move the way you have to in situations like these. Chung and I both know it’s all for show, but he laughs maniacally anyway.

“Best of luck, Mr. Jones!” He laughs again as his lackeys muscle me into the torpedo room. Chung points his remote control right at me and toggles the switch again. I’m treated to his grating cackle one last time as the wall irises shut between us, and then it’s just me, the bodybuilder henchmen and the scientists. There’s a moment of awkward silence, and then I hear footsteps behind me, and hear the whoosh of the blackjack just before it hits me in the back of the head.

* * *

It feels like they encased me in latex, which would actually make sense. I bet it’s a sporty get-up, probably has a racing stripe down the side and everything. I can breathe easily, but Chung was right. I’m completely in the dark: no sight, no sound, no smell, no sensory input at all. I’m tied up spread eagle inside the oversized torpedo, tightly enough so that I can’t make any appreciable ripples in the water, but not so tight that my binds create undue sensation. In other words, pain. The temperature is completely neutral – I can’t even tell whether I’m facing up or down.

Chung was right about something else: I never realized how dependent I am on my ability to analyze whatever situation I might find myself in. I’ve discovered all I can about my present situation in about three seconds flat, and what precious little information I gathered isn’t helping me any. Back in his stainless steel throwback interrogation chamber I could read Chung like a book, mostly because I was extremely familiar with my situation: bad guy captures good guy. Bad guy holds good guy hostage until he hears what he wants to. Good guy refuses to cooperate, pain ensues.

Only problem here is I’m not feeling any pain, and it’s starting to bother me. Usually you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, during interrogation. Ruthless dictators, mad billionaires and ex-military nutbags usually only come up with so many variations on the classic “hit you in the stomach ‘till you crack or pull a Houdini” trick, but it appears as if Chung has stumbled upon something remarkably original. Secret agents, believe it or not, are creatures of habit. It might look spontaneous from the outside: save the world, steal the bulletproof Ferrari, get the girl and hit Monte Carlo, but once you’ve done it a few times patterns begin to emerge. It’s when those patterns break down that you get into trouble.

However, I’m not a complete stranger to sensory deprivation. People in Hollywood with too much money pay for this kind of thing, right? Of course, they probably aren’t tied down, and don’t have to think about the Asian dictator bent on world domination that is doubtless watching them on closed-circuit TV, but then again, they aren’t the real-life version of James Bond (or his American counterpart, anyway). Danger is my middle name, and with danger comes stress. Maybe I could learn something from this.

* * *

It could be ten minutes in, or it could be ten days. I tried counting heartbeats, but it’s hard to multiply by what I can only guess might be my resting rate without losing count. I have to focus on something, or risk proving Chung right.

Chung. Who is he, anyway? A run of the mill wannabe military dictator. What does he represent? In the old days, right when I got into this business, it was easy to align people like Chung with Communism, the espoused enemy of the free world. Bad and good was simple, which opened the doors for all sorts of weird fun stuff, stuff that guys like James Bond made famous. Today, though, you’d think the number one threat would be terrorism, and radical religious groups. Chung, all he wants is money, maybe some fast cars, and the respect of countries like the US and England. He might say he’s out for world domination, but really, the best he’s hoping for is a little slice of the pie, a piece that I’m ill equipped to give him. I honestly don’t know much of anything that would be useful to Chung, Langley wouldn’t send me into the field with that kind of sensitive information at my disposal.

All of that begs the question, why am I here? If Chung isn’t much more than a paper tiger, a throwback who watches too many movies and invests in all stainless steel construction, why should an operative like me, dedicated to freedom at all costs, be sent to take him down, to almost certainly be captured, exchange sarcastic remarks with his captor and escape heroically? Why have I been doomed to repeat this pattern over and over again? You’d think sooner or later they would just start off by sending in the Marines and showing guys like Chung that there are more important things than expensive beard trimmers and elaborate means of torture. But I suppose if they did that, I’d be out of a job. If you think of it that way, what purpose do I serve? Aren’t I just a rather expensive line item that the government would be better off without?

Furthermore, who am I, really? I live in a set pattern. I fulfill a necessary (at least it always seemed so) role: I’m the martyr who always somehow seems to survive, only to be hung out to dry again and again. All of this is established, and reflected in exchanges like the one I just had with Chung. I know what I represent to the suits at Langley, and to men like Chung. Can I really be certain what I represent to myself, though? Am I more than a set of clichés? If not, how did I get this way?

* * *

Ten thousand or so heartbeats later; and I’m starting to lose my focus. I’m starting to remember things – unusually vivid memories, things verging on hallucinations. All I can think about is right now is a kid I grew up with. Ray Schneider was his name, but he always insisted everyone call him Raymundo. I haven’t thought about Raymundo in years, since before I joined the Navy. Raymundo lived in the house across the street from mine for about ten years. His parents were ex-hippies, big on self-expression. That probably explained why they let him get away with insisting on being called Raymundo. While most of the other kids, including me, were held hostage by their parents’ routine, Raymundo was mainly autonomous. For me, it was school Monday-Friday, church Sunday, dinner at 5:30, one hour of TV a day, and chores. For Raymundo it was more like playtime all the time. He came to school by choice, something I never understood.

What I did understand, though, was that Raymundo always had the best stuff, and you could have the most fun at his house. Raymundo was a popular kid. He had the biggest Erector set I’ve ever seen and he got five dollars a week in allowance without doing any chores, but the most remarkable thing about Raymundo were his Halloween costumes.

Most parents think it’s cute for their kids to dress up and go trick-or-treating, and in those days they weren’t as concerned with razor blades in the Hershey bars, so kids had a bit more freedom, but lines were always drawn concerning what, exactly, could be worn as a costume. I remember wanting to be an axe murderer when I was eight. My mom had a complete shit fit, and I ended up going as a scarecrow. That same year Raymundo decided to be Allen Ginsburg. None of us had any idea who he was, but we knew it was cool that the book of poems his parents gave him to carry around contained the word “ass,” among others.

The next year, Raymundo went as Sean Connery’s James Bond. He wore a grey suit, and went around saying “Pussy Galore” over and over again. I had never seen Goldfinger before, but of course Raymundo’s parents had a reel-to-reel and Raymundo owned a copy. I watched it ten times in a week. It was a revelation.

It doesn’t really make sense that I should be thinking about him now, trapped in a tank of lukewarm water with my eyes and ears glued shut, but then I guess nothing makes sense at this point.

* * *

It’s strange. I’m not used to seeing memories like this – it’s bordering on what you might call an out-of-body experience. I can vividly remember my first step, the first time I rode a bike, my first date, all the big moments. And I’m seeing them from some third person perspective, looking down on the driveway, or into the back seat of that convertible, I’m looking at myself doing the things that I think, at least, I remember doing. It’s confusing, and it makes me question if they ever happened in the first place. I remember my first day at military school. I’m playing it back and forth like a movie – watching myself walk into that office and salute the man behind the desk. How the hell did I know how to salute? Who told me ahead of time that I should have been able to see myself in my shoes? It’s as if I was waiting for a drill sergeant to come along and ask what my major malfunction was. I sure as shit wasn’t about to have one. At the time I told myself I was just being smart, getting ahead of the game, but now I’m wondering how exactly I knew what the game was.

This seems to be a recurring theme – every time I came to a critical juncture, a situation I was personally unfamiliar with, I seemed to have the answers, or at the very least an idea of what the answer should be. No one told me I had to be angsty about girls, I learned that from The Wonder Years. No one told me not to try to talk to the captain of the football team, I already knew he was too cool for me. The question of why or how I knew that never mattered to me, at least until now. Where was I getting the answers? I’m not the smartest guy in the world, so I can rule out good guesses. I’m not that lucky, so that couldn’t be it, either.

* * *

By the time I was thirteen, I spent the majority of my free time in Raymundo’s basement, watching movies. I would watch anything he had on hand, but my favorites were always the war movies, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films, and most of all James Bond. Raymundo was a little dismissive of my Bond-leanings. He had moved on to what he thought were bigger and better things. He spent his days working on impressions, fixated on the notion that he was the next Peter Sellers. We must have watched every Pink Panther movie ever made at least ten times. I would walk into his house after school, knowing that he was waiting, behind a curtain or in the closet, to attack me like Kato would have done.

Our interactions became more and more scripted over time. After a year of movie watching and mastering of impressions, we rarely had a conversation free of cultural references. I was fond of adopting a Connery accent at odd times, say, when I was asking his mom if I could finish the peanut butter. Raymundo began wearing trench coats and speaking with a French accent. It was just easier for us to communicate this way – you didn’t have to stretch for meaning when you were quoting from Apocalypse Now, because the other guy had already seen it, and could fill in the context automatically. I still do that – it works great with guys like Chung, because they’ve seen all the movies, they understand what to say next, when to pause for effect, when to yell and when to say nothing at all. It doesn’t work so well with women, though – if you can’t let on you’re a secret agent, it’s hard for them to read between the lines.

* * *

Ten thousand more heartbeats, and I’m actually savoring the fact that my mouth is painfully dry. I’m surrounded by water and completely unable to drink any of it. Of course, this is part of my torture, but being uncomfortable has become better than being nothing at all.

It occurs to me now that I’m barely better than nothing myself – I’m a cipher, an empty shell filled by repetition, by patterns that have consumed me. I’ve answered my question: who am I? I’m no one. I, we, live in a world consumed by archetypes, by clichés. Chung’s punishment isn’t original, it can’t be. No one has the chops anymore to come up with anything new. All he’s done is adapt starvation to a more modern standard. Think about it, concentrate on it: what is it we encounter most frequently? External media. TV, movies, the internet most recently, billboards, radio, you name it. Our internal thoughts are prompted by external forces. Which one is more real? I don’t remind people (or myself) of James Bond, James Bond reminds people of me. Which one is the fiction?

It makes sense that people come out of this chamber, the photon torpedo (see, I couldn’t even come up with an authentic description of it!) with no personality. When they’re confronted with themselves, it becomes clear they aren’t really anybody at all. It’s genius. If only Chung knew how it worked.

* * *

The last time I saw Raymundo was the day before he headed off to acting school. I crossed the street to say goodbye, and he came out onto the front stoop, wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette.

“Jones,” he said, “it’s our last hurrah.” He had recently adopted an English accent. It was hard to remember what his original voice sounded like, but I didn’t really care. His impressions were funny.

We shook hands, and I thought to myself, I have to say something fitting, something cool. Raymundo deserves nothing less. I backed up a step, affected my best Goldfinger impression, and said “Good-bye, Mr. Bond.”

He smiled, and retorted: “Do you really expect me to talk?”

I replied, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” We both laughed, and that was the last time I saw him.

Looking back on it, it seems funny, but somehow fitting that neither of us actually said anything. Our relationship began with a 35mm copy of Goldfinger, and it ended with us acting out the climactic scene. We’ve both been acting ever since. I suppose I have Raymundo to thank for all of this.

* * *

Chung can’t really care that much. He just thinks he cares about what I know because it’s what his character is supposed to do. What he doesn’t realize is that I don’t care anymore. My character is about to do something he’s never supposed to do: give up. I’ll tell him anything he wants to know, and what I don’t know I’ll make up. That’ll be the end of James Bond, the end of Steve McQueen, the end of Arnold Schwarzenegger and of Bruce Willis. I’ll tell him whatever meaningless facts he wants to know, and then I’ll shake his hand and thank him.

I’ve never felt better.