Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  So much for the man himself. Now to the pursuit plan. It seemed to him, Pharris White, that a long line of beaters sweeping across the park would best meet the situation. They would drive Popper. Feints and stalking maneuvers and circling ploys all had their place, of course, but there came a time when you must engage your enemy directly and whip him in the field, and this, or so it seemed to him, was just such a time. He only regretted that they could not hunt him down with torches and dogs. Their sweep would converge on the rock dome known as the Devil’s Pincushion, and there Popper would be taken. Then at last this man could be put away and given plenty of time in solitary confinement to gnaw on his knuckles, to think over his crimes and expiate them in cold darkness. Were there any questions? Suggestions? Had they understood his presentation and could he take it that they were in substantial agreement on all the main points?

  It was a fairly long speech, given the urgent nature of the occasion, and there was further delay as the lawyers bustled about looking for sticks. Some of the men, a sizable minority, refused to take part in the manhunt, giving as their reasons advanced age, bad weather, compromised dignity, allergies, dependent children, obesity, fear of biting insects, potential mental anguish, pain and suffering and loss of consortium, unsuitable shoes, low-back pain, weak eyes, hammer toes and religious scruples, but there remained many willing hands and Pharris White soon had them deployed in a long skirmish line.

  He stood at the center and a bit forward, facing them, the captain of a kickoff team. “Guide on me!” he shouted, to the left and then to the right. “Guide on my baton! Keep your dress and watch your interval! Now! Let’s beat! Let’s drive!”

  He lowered his stick and the men moved out, flailing away at the spring greenery. Their blood was up again.

  But there are many holes in the earth, not all of them scrabbled out with claws or tools of iron, and Popper had found himself a burrow long before that drive began. He sat dripping and panting in the dark hollow place behind Rainbow Falls. Far into the night he sat there in that spherical chamber behind a curtain of falling water. He considered leaving his hat floating suggestively in the pool below, then decided that Pharris White would not be so easily taken in. From time to time he dabbed at his hands with a handkerchief. Wet mud wasn’t so bad, but dried mud, cracking with the flex of his hand, and tiny clods dangling from his finger hairs, that was not to be endured.

  THERE FOLLOWED another long Gnomonic stasis. Twelve years passed before Mr. Jimmerson made another excursion. He was a pallbearer at the graveside service for Mr. Bates and he went to the doctor now and then but it was a rare day when he set foot outside his limestone sanctuary on Bulmer Avenue. He shunned the light of day and did not leave town again for some twelve years.

  No other private residence was left on the street, now cast in cold shadow by the expressway that ran overhead. Standing forsaken, the Gnomon Temple rose up between two parts of the divided highway, within the acute angle of an important interchange, and it sometimes happened that a startled motorist made eye contact with Maceo as he stood before one of the broken windows upstairs, just a few feet away from the streaming traffic.

  Directly behind the Temple there was now located a maintenance yard for the city’s dump trucks and garbage trucks. This was not the nuisance it might have been because the hammering and clanging that went on inside the yard could not be heard over the traffic roar on the freeway, which was constant, except during the period between 3 and 4 a.m., when there was a slight falling off. Still, in the summer, there was a problem with dust from the yard.

  Things had changed out front too. Bulmer Avenue lay in eternal gloom amid a colonnade of pilings, and had become a loitering place for vagrants, petty criminals and youth gangs. When the boys burned tires in the street, the smoke rolled down the corridors of the Temple and stung Mr. Jimmerson’s eyes and blackened his nostrils. Tramps came to the door and asked about supper, taking the big house for a rescue mission. There were younger, daring tramps who in winter would lay a plank from one of the freeway pillars to an upstairs dormer window of the Temple, then crawl across it and bed down inside with the pigeons. They left behind them their names written on the walls, their poems, curses and drawings. On the floor they left a mess of wine bottles and newspaper bedding and foul droppings for Maceo and Ed to clean up.

  At that, they were less trouble than the paying guests, now long gone, to Mr. Jimmerson’s great delight, along with Miss Hine, her innovations and her endless complaints about the sour air in the house. What a time that had been. The vexations! The interruptions! The questions! His answers! Yes. Yes. What? No. What a trial for a man engaged in the fine labor of speculative thought. Ed was still here but all the others were gone now, and, with two or three haunting exceptions, their faces forgotten.

  The upper part of the Temple had been practically abandoned. Everything upstairs was either broken or stopped up and that area was no longer in use. Winds played about freely through the rooms. There were leaks in the roof. Outside, the old Buick sat earthbound, a rusty black hulk with no wheels. Down in the basement rats nested in the cold boiler.

  There was no heat in the house except for that given off by the fireplace in the Red Room, and it was here in the reclining chairs that Mr. Jimmerson, Maceo, Babcock and Ed slept through the long winter nights, the four of them laid out in a row with their hats and coats on, and their blankets tucked up under their arms, like so many first-class passengers on the Promenade deck of a Cunard liner.

  Only here and there had the decay been held back. The kitchen still functioned, as did one bathroom. The purple curtains in the Inner Hall had faded and there were bits of plaster on the floor but on the whole this room had retained its static purity, similar to that of the innermost vault of a pyramid.

  When the weather was pleasant, Mr. Jimmerson shuffled about from room to room with a big book in his hand, much as ever. “Just looking something up,” he would say, in the same apologetic way, but with a grin grown dreadful over the years, so that the person encountered quickly turned away.

  Fanny Jimmerson was no longer nearby to keep an eye on things, she having been promoted yet again and rewarded with an assignment to New Jersey, where she now sat on the board of directors of the cosmetics company and lived in semi-retirement. She lived alone in a modest white house about an hour’s drive from the scene of her honeymoon, though she did not often make that drive. The boy, Jerome Jimmerson, who was trying to make his way on the New York stage, sometimes came down to spend a weekend with her, but he had his own life now in Japanese puppet theater, and of course his own chums in the close-knit puppeteer community in Greenwich Village, and he did not come down as often as she would have liked. At the beginning of each month, Fanny wrote three letters and mailed them out with checks attached; one went to brother Sydney in Mexico, one to her husband Lamar and one to her son Jerome. Such response as she got was spotty.

  As for Miss Hine, she had been called away suddenly to assume another housekeeping burden. One day she packed a few things and drove down to Lafayette to care for her older but smaller brother, Arnold “Tiny” Hine, recently widowed and ailing. It was to be a temporary leave. She was to see Tiny through his convalescence, then return to the Temple. But Tiny’s recovery was slow, much slower than the doctor had predicted, and then just when it was thought to be complete he was stricken anew with something the doctor could not quite put his finger on, for all his testing of Tiny’s fluids. Tiny complained of a fire in his groin and of a kink in his neck. At times he was in pain—“Don’t touch the bed!”—and at other times he was able to go out at night and attend the wrestling matches with his pals. Miss Hine was obliged to extend her stay indefinitely and see to her brother’s needs. She fetched things for him, handled his extensive correspondence with coin clubs and coin magazines, served him three meals a day on a tray and turned his television antenna on demand.

  This left the Bulmer Avenue rooming house in Burnette without a manager. Neither Mr. Jimme
rson nor Maceo was willing to take on the job and attrition soon set in. The roomers got a free ride for a while, as Mr. Jimmerson did not bother to collect the rent, but in the course of things they moved on, fell dead or were arrested, one by one, and no new roomers were taken in to replace them.

  The last one was Ed, a young sandy-haired army veteran who wore cowboy clothes and Wellington boots. Ed found a home in the Temple and refused to leave. The food, the pace, the air, the company—everything suited him. He stayed on and was given his meals and a little pocket money in return for helping Maceo around the house. Not that he was of much real help. There was hardly anything Ed could do, even under the strictest supervision. He carried a note in his wallet from a doctor, often brandished, saying that he did not have to work. Neither he nor Mr. Jimmerson could cook and they had a hard time of it, feeding mostly on day-old doughnuts, during that period when Maceo got mixed up with the Black Muslims. This was at about the same time that Popper got mixed up with the left-wing women far away, in an eastern city.

  The Black Muslim episode was a curious one. Maceo left in the night and came back in the night without a word. He went to Chicago and stood on a street corner for a month or so wearing a fez, calling himself Fahad Murad, selling Muslim newspapers and trying to scowl at the passing white devils. But it didn’t work out, he was no good as a public menace and he didn’t find street life in the city fulfilling. He was perhaps too old to become a burning sword of Black Islam and late one night he came back to the Temple wearing his old hat with the Christian brim. He resumed his duties and his old name with no word of explanation.

  Then there came bad news from Florida. Scales, the Gnomon baker in Naples, on the Gulf coast, had died, blown up in his garage during the course of an alchemical experiment. There would be no more newspaper clippings from Scales, with photographs showing big sinkholes in Alabama and Florida, giving support to his theory of continental subsidence. What had happened to Atlantis, Scales believed, was now happening to America, though at a less dramatic rate of collapse. Scales, as Scales, was not much missed, even by his family, but with his passing the Gnomon Pillar in Naples was lost, another one down with all hands, and with that loss went the southeastern anchor of the Continental Gnomonic Triangle. So it was that Mr. Jimmerson no longer had an enormous, skewed triangle to work with, but only a bare line from the Temple in Burnette to the last remaining Pillar in the country, that of Mr. Morehead Moaler in La Coma, Texas.

  In many ways this simplified his calculations. Working out Gnomonic readings from a line, long or short, vertical or canted, was child’s play. But a line had extension only and no depth to speak of. Was this fit work for the Master of Gnomons? Weren’t these line readings with their tiresome recurring decimals very feeble stuff? The garage blast in Florida had, overnight, left the Continental Triangle a vast dead zone, and Mr. Jimmerson became despondent when he thought of spending the rest of his life at this paltry business of line analysis.

  For a time he all but abandoned his studies, as he had once done years ago. Then one night when he was stretched out on his recliner, with snores and visible puffs of breath all about him, there came a flash of understanding, accompanied by a bodily spasm. The apparent impasse was, he saw, a new opening. A leap at his age! Who would have thought it? For all his accomplishments of the past, he was truly just now hitting his stride. How foolish he had been to think that his best work was behind him.

  The leap resolved itself into something called the Jimmerson Lag, which was to complement and shore up the Jimmerson Spiral. The Lag would account for all those troublesome loose ends and recalcitrant phenomena left unaddressed or evaded by the Spiral, or nearly all of them. That which was confused was now made clear, or fairly clear. Briefly put, the Jimmerson Lag postulated a certain amount of slack in the universe. The numerical value of that slippage or lag came to .6002, as best Mr. Jimmerson could reckon it, taking into account the ragged value of pi, the odd tilt of the earth, the lopsided nature of the Continental Triangle and many other such anomalies. How Sydney Hen would fume when he learned of this advance! He had been so maliciously eager to belittle the Spiral, only to come around later in his grudging way, first calling it a lucky hit, then trying to claim it as his own idea! So it would be with the Lag. But how to reach Sydney? Was he still alive? He had been silent for a very long time.

  With the principle of the Jimmerson Lag conceived and stated, there now remained the elucidation, or rather the obfuscation. The idea had now to be properly clothed in Gnomonic riddles and allegories at generous Gnomonic length. It was no easy task, forming these long sentences in one’s head and dictating them against the roar of the freeway traffic, and Mr. Jimmerson knew that he could never have done the job alone. Maurice was a godsend.

  Maurice Babcock came late to the Temple. He was a darkish man about fifty years old, of retiring disposition, a court stenographer from Chicago, a Rosicrucian, not fat but with the soft look of a middle-aged bachelor who has a good job, money in the bank, no debts and no family responsibilities. Babcock did his job well. He minded his own business. He did not speak of his aspirations. He ordered his shoes from England, his shirts from Baltimore and his small hats from a hat shop in Salt Lake City that catered to the needs of young Mormon missionaries. He wore these hats in a seasonal color sequence, from opalescent gray through black, high on his head and dead level with the horizon. He took pills and time-release capsules throughout the day, avoided all foods prepared in aluminum cookware and ate a bowl of bran at bedtime to scour the pipes. His fellow workers regarded him as a hypochondriac but then it was not they who suffered from those dull headaches induced by chronic constipation. He remained a bachelor because there was no woman in all Chicago refined enough for him—Dolores herself did not really measure up—and out of a fear of female extravagance, and an even deeper one of getting tangled up in someone else’s family. When he found himself alone in an elevator with a pretty girl he would smile at her with the heavylidded smile of an Argentine playboy, but saying nothing and meaning no harm. The girls turned away. In his spare time he read. He kept up with medical developments and indulged a taste for esoteric lore.

  His introduction to Gnomonism came one Saturday morning when he was poking about in an old bookstore and ran across a cast-off trove of Gnomon pamphlets and books, including a copy of 101 Gnomon Facts, one of the rare, unsigned copies. He bought the lot for a five-dollar bill, took it home and read it through with wonder, lost in triangles for the weekend. This is the stuff for me. He knew it at once. This is what I’ve been looking for. My search for certitudes is over. He hastened to Burnette and called on Mr. Jimmerson, hopeful of getting an autograph, a word or two from the Master’s lips, more and thicker books, with footnotes longer than the text proper, perhaps even a signed photograph.

  The shabbiness of the Temple put him off. The odor reminded him of the holding cells at the courthouse. He was a little disappointed in Mr. Jimmerson’s conversation and badly shaken by his grin. The Master was not the white-maned old gentleman with gaunt face and long fingers he had visualized. The big tuber nose came as a surprise.

  But for all that, Babcock came back again and again. He knew he was on to something this time. The Rosicrucians had finer robes and the Brothers of Luxor had eerier ceremonies, but in the way of ideas that could not quite be grasped, neither of them had anything to touch the Cone of Fate or the Jimmerson Spiral. Gnomonism was the first really sound synthesis he had found of Atlantean, Hermetic and Pythagorean knowledge. The only one he had found, come to that. In his head he could feel magnetic forces gathering. He knew of some people who would be surprised when the discharge came. And all for a five-dollar bill! What did the bookseller buy with it one-half so precious?

  He was initiated into the Society on a day which he had reckoned to be the cusp of a new Gnomonic cycle. The Master had wanted him to revive the Pillar in Chicago but Babcock begged off, saying he preferred to work here at the Temple, at the heart of things, the big things
soon to come. Here under the Master’s gaze he could hone himself to a fine edge. The wheel was turning, a time of increase was near and Maurice Babcock’s proper place was right here at the center of it all. He saw a map take fire and blaze up, as in the movies when they wish to show the spread of something, usually pernicious.

  The workload was overwhelming, for Babcock tried at first to keep his court dates and see Dolores and his doctors now and again, as well as take down Mr. Jimmerson’s halting words on his stenotype machine. On the commuter train he studied for his advanced degrees. Back and forth he went between Chicago and Burnette, at all hours. Some nights he slept over in the Temple, collapsing on the reclining chair that had been assigned to him. It was not next to the Master, or at the other end, but, to his annoyance, between Maceo and Ed. Ed said he had “dubs” on the end chair.

  Babcock’s health, never good, declined. His head throbbed under the overload. His ears rang. Once he lay on his recliner for two days without moving or speaking. He lay there with his mouth open and his hands clenched at his sides, unable to speak or raise his head. Birds might have lighted on his face and walked around. No one disturbed him, a long lie-in was hardly an occasion for comment in the Red Room, but when he came around and regained muscular control he was frightened. Then and there he decided to quit his stenography job, at least until such time as he could come to grips with the situation here at the Temple. First things first. He gave up his Chicago apartment, cut his professional moorings and came to live in the Temple.