Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  I believe I was the first person in town to set eyes on him. Almost everybody else was in the plaza watching a cockfight that, as far as I could tell, was the local equivalent of Sugar Ray Robinson against Jake LaMotta. O’Donnell lived in a two-storey house not far from the consulate, but I’d learned that he also maintained a storehouse on the riverbank. Having already broken into the former one night without finding any useful clues, I saw this as a good opportunity to make a discreet search of the latter. So close to the jungle there was a perceptible change in the insect demographics, and I was plucking some sort of marauding flechette out of my ear when I heard movement from the treeline.

  The boy must have been around fourteen or fifteen years old. His skin was as tanned as if he’d never spent a day indoors – not to mention filthy, and crosshatched with weals and bites – but underneath all that he was a Caucasian with a neat haircut. The cut of his ragged vest and pants reminded me of the styles of my own youth, but they were made of some coarse woven fiber that wasn’t cotton or linen. With wide eyes he staggered forward, as if his sheer curiosity at the sight of me was enough to overcome his obvious exhaustion.

  ‘Is this New York?’ he said in English.

  ‘This is San Esteban, kid. Who are you? Where the hell did you come from?’

  ‘My name is Colby Droulhiole. I came from the camp.’ And then I had to lunge forward to catch him in my arms before he toppled face-first into the mud.

  Those were the last words I got out of the boy for a long time. Wilson and I installed him in one of the ‘guest rooms’ at the consulate. The jungle can turn any Anglo-Saxon into a swoony Victorian lady, constantly in need of bed-rest, but this case was more severe than most: somehow young Droulhiole had held off his fever long enough to make it to town, but by the time we took off his clothes he was already broiling so badly you might have thought his insides were undergoing some unspeakable pupation. Even though, in the days that followed, his sheets were changed with great efficiency (no bordello under Wilson’s punctilious management could be unaccustomed to a brisk turnover of linens) it sometimes felt as if what we really needed was an entire civil-engineering infrastructure – dams and aqueducts and storm drains – to contain the volume of fluid that was pouring out of his body: the typhoons of sweat and the unceasing trickle from the anus and the blisters so dropsical that you had to pop them into a towel or the pus might splatter your hand up to the wrist. A recent fatal bar brawl had left San Esteban without a trustworthy MD, but it turned out that Wilson’s geishas, and indeed Wilson himself, swore by a soup made from the flower of the kapok tree. Apart from that, there wasn’t much to do but pour water down the boy’s throat and dab ointment on his sores. Sometimes I overheard the women whispering to each other, and none of them believed he would recover. He was just too weak.

  Of course, I was rooting pretty hard for the boy, because there were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him. When I searched his pockets and his knapsack, I found a reel of catgut, bandages, spare socks and underpants, soap, candles, rock salt, some wooden darts and stakes, a kind of obsidian shiv, a navigational star chart, a detailed but imprecise handdrawn map of the American tropics, the dried-up carcass of a scarab with a deformed horn (perhaps a strange good-luck charm, like a rabbit’s foot?), and a few other odds and ends. All of these things were handmade. If he’d packed any food, there was none left.

  He’d told me that he’d come from the camp. But he wasn’t some Libyan filibuster. He was a rangy teenager who spoke in an American accent. So I couldn’t understand what business he had training to be a guerrilla, and I couldn’t understand why he or anyone else would think he could possibly survive a jungle trek, this tenderfoot scout out here on his own with no compass and no printed map and no weapons or tools you couldn’t find in a Bronze Age display at a museum. If the Pozkito/Branch 9/United Fruit training camp was as deep in the wilds as I had estimated, he had done extraordinarily well even to make it to San Esteban. And yet, for all my curiosity, his own story didn’t matter very much, provided he could give me a first-hand account of the camp.

  Every day I sat with Droulhiole. I wanted to make sure that, if he ever woke up, mine would be the first face he saw, and he would imprint on me like a hatchling goose. When he murmured in his sleep I could never make out the words but nevertheless I would press my ear to his mouth as if to a seashell and hear the jungle in his guts. Then, around the time the girls went downstairs to the drawing room to await the river traders, I would walk home to my rented room to have a few glasses of guaro before going to bed. I’d told Wilson that, because I was the one who found the boy, I felt a personal responsibility for his wellbeing, which of course Wilson found quite proper. Nobody except me knew what the boy had said before he collapsed.

  On the afternoon of the sixth day of the vigil, Wilson’s housekeeper Reyna saw me coming out of the washroom of the consulate and told me that Wilson was looking for me because he had some news. I thanked her and encouraged her to look in on the boy. Downstairs, I found Wilson in his study.

  ‘How’s the patient?’ he said.

  ‘Stinks worse than ever.’

  ‘Today I was reminiscing about how Mother always used to give me a little present after we came home from the dentist. Made the horror of the drill feel quite inconsequential in retrospect. If he does pull through, we must make sure he has his pick of the ladies for a few nights. As a reward for his fortitude. He’d enjoy that, I suppose? My own school years feel terribly distant now, and every generation is so different from the last, but boys of his age do still go in for that sort of thing, don’t they? It hasn’t been displaced by … I wouldn’t know – crystal-radio sets and so forth?’

  ‘I think 15-year-old boys still go in for exotic pussy, yes.’

  ‘Splendid – it’s settled.’

  ‘Reyna tells me you have some news?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes! I think you’ll be happy about this—’

  But then Reyna herself appeared in the door, looking distraught. ‘El chico,’ she said. ‘Creo que está muriendo.’

  Wilson and I followed her upstairs as fast as we could. In the last few minutes the boy’s condition had indeed come to a crisis. I could see his muscles cramping and quivering like a seizure at half-speed, and his face had turned the color of dishwater, and Reyna had turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke as he vomited a clear bile, the viscous dregs of a dozen cups of kapok-flower soup. I put a hand to his forehead and found his temperature had fallen so precipitously that his skull should have cracked like quenched steel.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much we can do,’ I said.

  Wilson told Reyna, who was already praying under her breath, to get the priest. After that he and I stood there in silence, hands in our pockets, fixing the boy with the strenuous attention of the utterly impotent, as if watching a house burn down.

  But by the time the priest arrived, the boy looked healthier than any of us.

  He was still unconscious, but now it was a tranquil sleep; for the first time, I could hear him quietly snoring. The color had returned to his face and his temperature was more sensible. Evidently all that strife earlier had been a final push, a Liberation of Paris. The priest was sent home again, grumbling about the wasted house call. Wilson told Reyna that she and the others weren’t to celebrate until the boy had incontestably recovered. ‘But it does look bally promising, doesn’t it?’

  After Reyna was gone, I said, ‘You had some good news for me. I guess I don’t dare hope that the name O’Donnell is about to come out of your mouth.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not back, no. But our little town has gained another rummy player, at least for a few days. There’s a chap passing through – an American, like you. I met him at the market today. He’s a salesman. Seemed personable, if rather guarded. Always nice to have a splash of new blood – socially, I mean.’

  ‘Who does he work for?’

  ‘He didn’t say. But when he lent me his magnifying glass I co
uldn’t help but notice it said “Property of Eastern Aggregate”. That’s a New York firm, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ I kept my voice steady but all of a sudden my nerve endings were trembling as if I’d caught a fever of my own. My whole time in Honduras I’d carried a Browning semi-automatic at my hip, but not until now had I ever really been aware of its weight.

  That night, I didn’t leave the sick room to go back to my own bed. So I was waiting there around three in the morning when they came for the boy.

  ‘We can see that the perceptions of our senses, even when they are clear, must necessarily contain certain confused elements,’ Leibniz writes, ‘for as all the bodies in the universe are in sympathy, ours receives the impressions of all the others, and while our senses respond to everything, our soul cannot pay attention to every particular. That is why our confused sensations are the result of a variety of perceptions. This variety is infinite. It is almost like the confused murmuring which is heard by those who approach the shore of a sea. It comes from the continual beatings of innumerable waves.’

  Quite so. I had once met an ambassador who had declared with great authority that true intuition, of the sort a spy must exercise, was ‘primal, ancient, almost mystical’. Which proved to me that this ambassador had never in his life experienced anything like intuition first-hand. Actually, intuition was a rigorous computational process involving enormous quantities of data. It simply wasn’t always recognizable as such because it didn’t waste its time writing reports to its superiors to justify its findings; that was what intuition had in common with yours truly. (And nobody had ever described my methods as ‘primal, ancient, almost mystical’, except, of course, in a sexual context.) For that reason, I couldn’t have explained why the words Eastern Aggregate rang the bell for last call in San Esteban.

  Nevertheless, intuition was how I came to be sitting there on the floor next to the door of the boy’s room, up against the wall on the hinge side so I wouldn’t be in sight if it opened. I hadn’t moved in several hours except to borrow his bed pan. The last of the river traders had left the consulate around two, and since then I had heard no voices from below, only the crickets and a rooster on night watch. There was no light but moonlight in the room and most likely no light but moonlight in the whole house. I wasn’t on edge any more. In fact, I had always found there was something about these intervals that really cleared your head, evened you out, let you feel the grain of the minutes passing, like sitting in a girl’s apartment waiting for her to come back with bagels and lox.

  I didn’t hear the stairs creak until the feet responsible were almost at the landing outside. Slowly, I slid up the wall to a standing position. The handle turned and the door swung open and a man stepped into the room. He was of a much heavier build than Wilson and he held a pistol. When the zbyszko took one more step forward, so that he was clear of the door, I spritzed him in the face with benzoic oxymorphone. Despite his bulk he folded up neatly.

  My plan was to question the Eastern Aggregate man after he woke up. Was he here to kill Droulhiole or just kidnap him? Was Eastern Aggregate working with Branch 9 and United Fruit? How had they learned of the boy’s presence here so soon? I had already pried his pistol out of his hand and I was about to pat down his pockets when I heard movement over my head.

  The consulate had only two floors. Someone was on the roof.

  Now I wasn’t so relaxed. I glanced at the window, which was hinged and had no lock. I considered firing blindly through the ceiling with my Browning, and I considered waiting next to the window for the second man to climb down through it. But if there was a second man, I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a third. Then I heard the first man groan. I cursed the benzoic oxymorphone, which must have denatured in the heat. It occurred to me to simplify the exercise by shooting the first man in the kneecap or even the head. But as soon as I used my own gun, any other asshole who had one would probably use his too, and until I had no other choice I wouldn’t run the risk of losing my ward to a stray .38 in a dark room.

  Instead, I just kicked the first man in the head hard enough to replenish his blackout. Then I went over to pull the sheet off the boy, before splashing most of a jug of water in his face. ‘Get up. You’re late for school.’ He just blinked at me. ‘I said get up.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he said. This was the first time he’d been fully conscious in six days. I had to yank him out of bed by the armpit. He tumbled to the floor, nude. I bent down, reached under the foot of the bed, and hoisted it up on to its headboard, with the mattress and frame leaning against the window.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘I mean right fucking now, friend.’ I grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the door. When he stumbled over the man on the ground he almost fell headlong again – but that hurdle was nothing compared to the stairs. One might almost have said he took the stairs like someone who’d never encountered a staircase before, except that didn’t quite cover it, because somehow he managed to take the stairs worse than someone who’d never seen a staircase before. Even allowing for the darkness and for the boy’s wasted muscles, I was astonished by the consistency with which he lost his footing on every eight-inch tread. But at last we got down to the foyer of the consulate. I threw open the front door and came out moving in a crouch, sweeping my Browning left and right and up to the rooftops. As far as I could tell, the street was deserted, so I beckoned to the boy to follow. For a moment – naked in the moonlight, trotting along in waggly imitation of my own combat prowl, bewildered by his surroundings – he resembled a sylvan mammal that for the first time in its life had braved a human settlement in search of food. Before we left, I picked up a piece of broken masonry and hurled it through one of the ground floor windows. Whoever was on the roof might have a harder time getting away once the household was roused.

  After that it was only a matter of stealing a horse.

  I was not so naïve as to assume that just because I’d nursed Droulhiole back from the brink of death, protected his identity as best I could, and rescued him from two or more intruders with guns, I could expect any gratitude. The boy was in his teens, after all. That he would be so uncooperative that I would actually have to resort to an interrogation room, however, I did not anticipate. While we were on our way to Tegucigalpa in another rackety old McCormick that I’d hired (along with its black driver) in Catacamas, I asked him again and again about the guerrilla training camp in the jungle, and he kept insisting that although he knew of some Indians running around with rifles, he had never had anything to do with them.

  ‘Kid, you might not remember, but you already told me you came from the camp, back when you were in a more forthcoming state of mind. There’s no use changing your story now.’

  ‘But I meant a different camp,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, and what camp is that? Summer camp? Camp Waskatoon-Hey-Ho for Boys?’

  ‘The movie. We were making the movie. You must know the movie.’

  I didn’t let that divert me. ‘What about before that? Where did you come from?’

  ‘I came from the camp.’

  ‘I meant before the camp,’ I said. ‘Where were you before the camp?’

  ‘Nowhere. I was never anywhere before the camp.’

  ‘God almighty. All right, let’s come back to that later. You said you were on your way to New York.’

  ‘I was on my way to Hollywood.’

  Over the past several hours, Droulhiole had shown all the symptoms of a mental condition that one might describe as the exact opposite of intuition: when a person gives up hope that any aspect of their waking life will ever be intelligible to them again. And most of these questions – these pretty simple questions – made him quail as if I was giving him a surprise exam on Leibniz’s metaphysics. Only when we were on the topic of his destination did he give unmistakable signs of telling a lie. He had that adolescent boy’s condition of looking entirely chinless when he wasn’t sure of himself, as if his lower jaw could retract all the way
into his body.

  One possibility was that he’d been trained at the camp to play a character under interrogation. Back in San Esteban, however, he’d been terrified of our stolen horse (a terror that would have been justified if he had known how raw it was going to rub his undercarriage over the next few hours, but at that point he did not) and he’d asked me if it was a ‘giant tapir’. He still refused to admit that he had ever seen one before, even in pictures. If that was part of his cover identity, it was a rather avant-garde cover identity. What had they told him at the camp? ‘Whatever you do, soldier, even if the bastards hang you upside down and put matches under your fingernails, for God’s sake don’t let on that you’ve ever seen a horse!’ The truck was apparently a revelation to him too, and electric light bulbs, and my Zippo.

  A second possibility was that he’d been brainwashed. A third was that he was, in the words of the agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual, ‘a schizoid or strange character [who] lives in a world of fantasy much of the time. Sometimes he seems unable to distinguish reality from the world of his own creating. The real world seems to him empty and meaningless, in contrast with the mysteriously significant world he has made.’ And a fourth possibility was that he was mentally subnormal. By now I’d supplied him with both clothes and salve. Our driver, who spoke no English, was attempting to overtake a caravan of mule carts laden with bananas. We were passing them so closely that I was able to lean out through the truck’s window and grab a fruit, though it wasn’t ripe enough to eat yet. In Honduras it was customary to bury a traveler where he fell, so there were graves by the side of the road, wooden crosses shored up by piles of stones. Beyond, green piney hills rolled into the distance, the sane and reasonable luxuriance of a forest that’s open to the sky, not clenched overhead like the jungle’s tesselar canopy. ‘Hollywood,’ I said. ‘Once again, kid, I must remind you that you are trying to sell me the cat meat after you already sold me the beef. By your own admission you were going to New York.’