Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  May 15th, 1939

  Carrotwood Hospital

  5600 Samuell Boulevard

  Dallas, TX

  United States

  My love,

  The most awful awful awful thing happened. Mr Rusk is dead. He was showing a few of us his new perpetual-motion machine when all of a sudden he curses & grabs the back of his neck, first time I ever heard him curse. He shows us all a scorpion that must’ve been hiding in his collar, just a baby one. He chuckles & tosses it off the edge. Then about a minute later he gets a sort of dreamy look on his face & says he has to lie down for a minute or two.

  I help him back to his cabin & almost as soon as he gets into bed with his clothes on he’s asleep but still mumbling & already hotter than hate. I stayed with him all night but he just got worse & worse, jolting like he was bouncing off an electric fence sometimes, once without even opening his eyes he reaches out & grabs my wrist so hard I think I got a sprain, & then by dawn it was over. That man worked so hard for us all & now he’s gone. I’m desolated Emmy I truly am.

  I’m worried too. I know it isn’t right when he’s barely in the ground to think of anything but the man’s own life cut short & his old mother back in Los Feliz not even knowing but I think the rest of us are in bad trouble now. There were two men in charge of this shoot, Mr Whelt & Mr Rusk, & Mr Whelt does just as much as Mr Rusk did if not more, I’m not sure he ever sleeps, but the difference is Mr Whelt doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t show up on camera. An empty stomach doesn’t show up on camera so he doesn’t care about an empty stomach, even his own. That lens is his only eye. It was always Mr Rusk who organised the trapping & the foraging out in the forest & let me tell you we have all the preview we need of what happens when there’s no Mr Rusk because there’s no Mr Rusk for the New York folks, never has been, & that’s why their trapping & foraging just sputtered out a while back when they got tired of going out into the forest all the time. Now they buy most of their food from us. What do they buy it with, they buy it with ice. Yes Emmy you read that right: Even though the New Yorkers only thought they’d be in the jungle for two weeks they brought an icemaking machine all the way here, hand pumped & runs on ammonia, because Mr Coehorn doesn’t like to go without a couple of Horse’s Necks every evening except of course it’s no use for that any more because the natives got all his brandy.

  We gladly send over a few hampers for each sack full of ice, but the icemaking machine can only make so much ice every day & it’s not enough to buy all the food the New Yorkers want at the price we give them so they have to barter with what all else they got. We thought they’d handed everything over to the natives just like us but it turns out they still have all kinds of department-store this-&-thats the natives didn’t want because they didn’t understand what they were for. Orange bitters, Alka Selzer, ear plugs, perfume, Dubble Bubble, pumice stones, chess sets, hair pomade, dried lavender, Benzedrine, [illegible], Chinese fans, oh & rubbers, I’m sure some of the crew over here brought rubbers themselves, a man must dream after all ha ha, but only a few, whereas Mr Coehorn packed a whole box, & maybe rubbers aren’t as important as food but Miss Droulhiole the assistant make-up lady is already so big that we all agree she must’ve got storked on the ship over here & not by that handsome gentleman from the United Fruit Company who bought us all drinks in San Esteban, & also I heard there’s a girl over yonder in the same predicament, so you can draw your own conclusions.

  Mr Whelt didn’t bring any sundries like that because he didn’t figure they’d be important & maybe they aren’t but folks are hankering for them, oh my goodness how we’re hankering for them now we’ve been out in the jungle for months. The New Yorkers have this special money like play money they call scrip that’s printed on artificial silk, & some people here were saying we should have special money too, but Mr Rusk & Mr Whelt wouldn’t have it, so we hand everything out just about equal, & it may sound a little New Deal but I’m glad we do because folks are still cordial to each other over on this side.

  But one day everything’s going to run out. I don’t just mean the D. Bubble & such. We’re almost out of film. You’re wondering, How’d we gobble so much film when we haven’t even started making the movie, but it’s all test shots, Mr Whelt keeps making test shots with stand-ins cause he says if he makes enough test shots then when the New Yorkers finally give us the temple back we’ll be so prepared we can make the whole movie without one minute or one frame wasted. The lights sure do bring out the moths.

  Mr Whelt didn’t mean to come anywhere near using up all the stock but there’s less than we thought cause a few cans got exposed by accident & Mr Rusk God rest his soul only figured it out a few weeks ago doing an inventory. Just today I heard Mr Whelt asking Mr Yang the developer how you make celluloid film from scratch, out here in the jungle he meant, what a lot of horsefeathers, but he was dead serious, so Mr Yang had to tell him that to make nitrate film you need silver chloride & nitro-somesuch & you can’t exactly cook those up in a skillet. He & Mr Yang were having this discussion only a few hours after Mr Rusk passed which I didn’t think was too respectful but when something like that happens it’s like Mr Whelt doesn’t even notice or he pretends he doesn’t, I remember him looking more upset about the film finishing sooner than he thought than he did this week about Mr Rusk finishing sooner than he thought.

  Paper too. Maybe bringing a printing press all the way to Honduras seems about as silly as bringing an icemaking machine, but you need it for call sheets & script revisions & memos & so on when it would take too long to have somebody type it up five sheets at a time on carbon, so we brought a printing press & about twenty reams of paper. But there was a week in February when there was a bad wind blowing through & folks were just feeling ornery as all get out, I think Mr Whelt & Mr Rusk were scared for their authority no matter how many fine words Mr Aldobrand said, so they had to hush people down & in the end they say OK from now on everybody can use the paper for what all bodily contingencies they must, no more dead leaves. They were only meaning to give out one sheet per body per day, but there’s a stampede up the steps & before long it’s all gone & all I managed to get my hands on was a few torn pieces left over. I know I said folks are still cordial to each other over on this side but not that day they weren’t.

  I did bring some nice writing paper of my own to write you on but I didn’t bring enough cause I never expected to be here so long & that’s almost gone now. Then the other morning I was talking to Miss Droulhiole about the paper running out & she asks me what I need paper for & shamefaced I have to explain that I still write letters even though they won’t be sent & she tells me she does just the same. I didn’t think anything of it but that night Trimble comes along & says a little jungle bird told him I’m short of writing paper for writing to my dear ones & he’d like to make me a gift of a few sheets.

  They’re scented & I can’t understand for the life of me how they held up so long under these toad-stranglers we’ve been having. I ask him what he wanted for them & he looks offended & says, Nothing, nothing at all. Now Emmy I knew I oughtn’t to put myself in any sort of hock to that man but I was thinking how if I ran out of paper I wouldn’t be able to write to you any more & my dear heart it makes me so glad to write to you, so I took it. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it, & the next day I asked Miss Droulhiole if she said anything to Trimble about the paper & she swore she never did.

  I better explain what I meant up there by perpetual-motion machine. Mr Rusk named it that but he told us it’s not really a perpetual-motion machine because a perpetual-motion machine is powered by nothing but its own self & his machine is powered by rain. Let’s see if I can explain how it works. It’s a block & tackle for pulling heavy loads up from the bottom of the steps to the top. There’s a barrel at the top of the temple that fills up when it’s raining, & the barrel is roped through a pulley to a sled, so when the barrel’s full you take the catch off the block & pay out the rope so the barrel drops down the flat
side & pulls the sled up the steps, & when the barrel’s nearly at the bottom it runs out of rope underneath & tips over so all the rainwater spills out, & when it’s empty it’s light enough so the weight of the sled with nothing on it sliding back down the steps pulls the barrel back up the flat side to the top of the temple. Did you get all that. I’d draw you a little diagram but you know I’m not much for drawing. Guess it doesn’t matter if you can’t picture it, I ought to remember just because I want to picture everything that’s going on where you are it doesn’t mean you want to picture everything that’s going on where I am.

  The other morning a few of us were sitting around gabbing about what it must’ve been like for the Mayans who built this place all those years ago & how long they lived & whether a Mayan mother would lose more babies in the cradle than an Okie mother & so on. You can imagine Emmy there were a lot of opportunities for indecorous talk in a discussion like that & I don’t claim much education myself but sometimes the ignorance around here can make your eyes spin in your head. Can’t even remember how we got ourselves on to the subject, but Mr Dutch the sound engineer, he announces that a lady can have a baby a year for ten years, but she can’t have one baby & then wait ten years & then have another baby, because a lady’s ovaries, he said, are like canned ham, it lasts a long time before you open it but once you open it you just have to keep eating it, at least a little off the top every so often, or it starts to go bad. We say to him, No, Mr Dutch, that isn’t even how canned ham works, let alone a lady’s ovaries, but he’s just stuck on it.

  So I tell him my parents had my brother when my mother was nineteen & I don’t know why but after that they didn’t have another til my mother was forty-one & they had me, & my brother has a daughter of his own, which means I have a niece only a year younger than me, & because of some bad feeling in the family I didn’t even meet her til around the time we were both finishing high school, so it wasn’t like meeting a niece or even a sister, just a charming new friend with a bit of a resemblance.

  & oh my goodness Emmy by then the things I was saying were of no pertinence at all to Mr Dutch & his theory of the ovaries but sometimes when I get an excuse to talk about you I just can’t stop til I’m stopped. If Mr Dutch didn’t interrupt with in fact the female tubes are more like a sleepy bear then I might could’ve just kept on, I would’ve told them about how you looked that first time I saw you, with the lily-pollen stains all over your dress, about how I saw you looking back at me & I didn’t dare hope your heart was stamping & winnying like mine was. When I think on that my darling that’s when I’m saddest that it all turned out like it did. I’d better finish now. I love you Emmeline Sapp. I know you don’t believe in God but saying a prayer that won’t be heard isn’t any sillier than writing a letter that won’t be sent. So remember Mr Rusk in your prayers.

  Yours forever,

  Gracie

  Elias Coehorn Jr. plays a round of the card game Canfield with caterer Art Canfield, which continues to amuse him every time … masseuse Patricia Boniakowski wonders if, seven months ago, back in her apartment in Astoria, she might have left her curling irons on … first assistant director Rick Halloran celebrates after successfully snatching a live fish out of the river with his bare hands for the first time after so many weeks of failure … Jervis Whelt asks Freddie Yang to explain to him in greater detail the principle of electropositivity in metals … Leland Trimble haggles over a pair of opera glasses with Coehorn’s friend Irma Kittredge … Joan Burlingame realises she has forgotten the collective noun for frogs and would have no way of checking if for some reason it became important to know … Virginia Droulhiole’s baby kicks … Gracie Calix folds up the letter to her niece and puts it in her jewelry box …

  * * *

  ‘Actually, I remember quite a lot going on in ’38 and ’39,’ said Irma.

  ‘Regardless, you must get through it as briskly as possible,’ Coehorn told Pennebaker. ‘Chop chop, just the facts.’

  ‘What about something a bit more impressionistic?’ said Irma. ‘You know, what life was like for a range of different people. A sort of cross section.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything more tiresome,’ said Coehorn. ‘Much better to—’

  But he was interrupted by his head chef wheeling a serving cart into the dining room, or not so much wheeling it as grinding it, since by now it had only one wheel that still turned.

  On the serving cart were four plates under blackened pewter cloches and a jug of cloudy red liquid with a lot of ice cubes, condensation cascading down the outside.

  ‘Now, how long have you been working on this?’ said Coehorn.

  ‘About eight months,’ said the head chef.

  ‘Justify your labors.’

  ‘To eat, we have dry-cured peccary ham and poached wild duck eggs on an unleavened manioc-flour muffin with a Hollandaise sauce made from wild duck egg yolk, breadnut butter, and juice of the unripe marlberry. To drink, we have manioc spirit and pickled casana juice seasoned with palm-frond charcoal, chili pepper, more unripe marlberry juice, and a Worcestershire sauce made from manioc vinegar, inga sugar, striped anchovy, pokeweed garlic, bamboo charcoal, and various other jungle spices.’

  Coehorn looked around delightedly. ‘Has everyone got it?’

  ‘No,’ said Irma, who was wearing a gown she’d sewn from the lining of one of Coehorn’s old ruined suits.

  ‘Eggs Benedict and a Bloody Mary!’ said Coehorn. ‘Just like they serve at the Waldorf. Notwithstanding a chemical outrage I once suffered in a limousine, it’s the best hangover cure in the world. In fact it may even beat the outrage.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever drank a Bloody Mary before,’ said Trimble.

  ‘Well, even in New York you can’t get one just anywhere. There’s only a small fraternity of qualified bartenders.’

  This evening breakfast to toast Pennebaker’s departure was a sufficiently special occasion that Coehorn hadn’t felt any hesitation in further glamorizing it with the premiere of the Eggs Pozkito and the Pozkito Mary. No one but he and the head chef knew quite how disproportionate a share of the settlement’s productive capacity had been diverted towards this enterprise over the last eight months (although Pennebaker must have suspected). But it was worth it, because this breakfast was Coehorn’s temple to the gods. Just as the Mayans’ own temple – in common with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or Braeswood and the neighboring estates along the Gold Coast – could have been built only by a civilisation with the surplus resources to indulge even its most grandiose fancies, so this breakfast had been made possible only by the current prosperity of the camp. Back when they were all still grateful for every fried wasp this would never have happened. In other words, the meal over which they would be discussing how to convey Coehorn’s visionary leadership to those back in New York was itself that leadership’s best symbol and substantiation. Unfortunately one couldn’t carry a poached wild duck egg two thousand miles. So here they were composing an official history instead.

  ‘Pennebaker, when you’re sitting there with my father, or with one of Trimble’s colleagues from the Mirror, or with whomever else wants to know – when you’re sitting there and your diction is temporarily intelligible between mouthfuls of funnel cake – I think you’ll have to start by explaining what good capitalists we are,’ said Coehorn as his head chef poured four glasses of Pozkito Mary, careful not to spill a drop.

  At all the mines, quarries, plantations, and logging camps operated by subsidiaries of Eastern Aggregate Company, and at some of the remoter factories and canneries, scrip was in circulation. Even in the states where it was illegal to pay workers in scrip vouchers that could only be spent at company stores, you could still offer advances on wages in that form, and workers always took advances when they could get them. To discourage counterfeiting, most denominations were printed not on paper but on rayon, an innovation unique to Eastern Aggregate. Elias Coehorn Sr. didn’t give a lot of homilies, but one day when his son was about fourte
en he had produced a ten-dollar voucher blotched brown with blood. ‘Last month a lumberjack in Alaska was stabbed to death by two other men who wanted to take this from him. His widow mailed it to me for reasons of which she could not give a comprehensible account in her letter. But do you know why I’m showing it to you, boy?’ Young Coehorn had shaken his head. ‘This is worthless to you and me. There is no store in the state of New York that will accept it. Somewhere I have a hundred uncut specimen sheets of identical bills. But in Alaska it was worth killing for. This scrap of artificial silk was worth killing for for no other reason than because I said so. I could do the same for any object in the world that’s big enough to stamp my name on it in six-point type. I could do the same for any dead leaf clogging our gutters. Do you understand? That is the power you may inherit one day. You must be mindful of that.’

  In the unmindful years that followed, the lesson might not have had its intended effect on Elias Coehorn Jr.: rather than helping him to see dead leaves as potential banknotes, it helped him to see banknotes as no more than mulch putting on airs, especially when, to take one instance of many, he encountered a friend in the street who wanted to refurbish a cognac distillery. During a meeting about the Honduras expedition so tedious that Coehorn thought he could feel his cerebrospinal fluid beginning to coagulate, the Eastern Aggregate logistician opposite him had said, ‘Usually when we send people out a long way from any banks, we issue scrip, but you won’t be down there long enough to need it. Now, these import liability warrants we talked about on the telephone—’ Coehorn stopped him. ‘I want scrip.’ He realised that he did, after all, want to experience for himself this particular privilege of his father’s: if he was to have a kingdom, even for a few days, then it should have a royal mint.

  But just as the manager had said, within the initial timetable of the expedition, there wasn’t any use for scrip. On the ship and at the site there were no company stores. Everyone just took whatever supplies they needed. Only after the native grifters made off with their loot did Coehorn decide to issue currency. The maxim of the settlement was not going to be a communistic ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ and some medium of exchange was required to allocate what resources they had left (or even just to get a poker tournament going to pass the time). And in retrospect this decision was a stroke of genius, because it produced a toytown version of a free market.