by Ned Beauman
‘Is this the business with the ice pick?’ I interjected.
‘I find it deeply regrettable that Dr Freeman and his transorbital entry are now so closely identified with the lobotomy in the popular imagination,’ said Kubie with some irritation. ‘In fact the gradatorectomy is a very complex, very delicate operation, involving a small hole drilled just behind the ear of a patient under general anesthetic. It should be understood that this is a modern field with tremendous untapped potential. Not some reckless shortcut of the kind one might have found at Carrotwood.’
‘So she’s fixed?’ I said.
‘She is far more lucid now than when she came to us. But there are lasting consequences to a gradatorectomy, as there are to any trespass inside the body. Her reasoning has been affected. Let me give you an example. Last week I told her that a ship is presently laying a transatlantic telephone cable along the bottom of the ocean from Scotland to Newfoundland. She did not believe me. No matter how many times I swore to it, she refused to believe that a manmade line could be expected to reliably carry electrical signals for two thousand miles down there among the tube worms and viperfish. Nothing in her experience heretofore has ever suggested that any such thing might be possible.’
‘I can see her point. It is a pretty strange thought.’
‘Let me give you another example. Our weekly motion-picture screening is popular among most of the patients, but Miss Sapp has no interest in it. She cannot take the pictures seriously. We watched a musical with Ethel Merman playing an ambassadress, I can’t remember the title. Miss Sapp made a series of objections. “Why are they singing and where is the music coming from and how do they know all the words to the songs already? Why do the clouds you see outside the window never change? Why do they not clear up the entire misunderstanding with a simple telephone call? Why, when Ethel Merman introduces herself by some made-up name, does someone not say to her, ‘No, I recognise you, you are the well-known singer Ethel Merman’?”’
‘Again, I can see her point. Those movies hardly make any sense sometimes.’
‘Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. Miss Sapp will not believe anything at all unless she can verify its workings with her own eyes and hands. Her evidentiary threshold is now insurmountably high. She will not imagine, she will not suspend her disbelief, she will make no temporary concessions for the sake of argument. No anomaly or novelty or fancy can find any purchase in her at all. She is sane now, yes, but perhaps too sane. The world outside this institute is a wondrous and irrational one, and I am not sure whether anyone quite so sane could manage there. Still – there is no doubt that in the final analysis the unilateral gradatorectomy was to her benefit.’
There was so little sense of progress as we walked that, even as Kubie gave his explanation, it felt as if the two of us were stationary and the observation windows of the dormitory rooms were spooling past like frames across the gate of a projector. But then something struck the back of my head, and as I turned around, something else struck my hip. I saw two pencils floating away on the current. A door that had been closed when we passed it was now ajar, and a woman peered out at us with loris eyes. Clutched in her right hand was another HB javelin.
Kubie said to her, ‘I know you don’t wish to have your pencils taken away again, Miss Monbut. Please go back in your room. Do some of the exercises we practiced. I’m busy with a visitor but somebody will be along in a moment to help you.’ The woman darted back out of sight. Kubie bolted the door, pressed an electric switch to summon an orderly to the room, and took out a fountain pen to write a note on the observation pad hanging from a hook. ‘My apologies,’ he said to me.
‘Not at all. You should try walking past the typing pool at the State Department.’
A community like this, I thought, must have its own scrip, albeit perhaps a scrip so esoteric that no two of its tokens looked alike. While we’d been distracted, some other traffic had begun to approach down the hallway: an orderly pushing a patient in the wheelchair. Even from this distance you could see the wheels flicking up a spray of water like a paddle-steamer, and the shaven patch, almost luminously naked, on the left side of the patient’s bowed head. I couldn’t seem to look away from him, because even though he was unconscious I had an unaccountably strong impression that he was about to raise his eyes and stare straight back at me. ‘Now, here before us is another good example,’ said Kubie. ‘This is a man of forty-one, successful in his field, but now reduced almost to catatonia by persistent hallucinations. He sees spirits and demigods. Grand conspiracies. Temporal distortions. Other universes, interpenetrating with our own. He is believed to have accidentally inhaled certain chemicals in the course of performing his job. Just now he was sedated in preparation for his unilateral gradatorectomy. I’m optimistic that after the operation we will see the same level of—’
That was as much as I heard before I blacked out.
Some time later I found myself back in Kubie’s office, stretched out on his stiff chaise longue. My suit was damp down one side. In through the open window drifted what sounded at first like some solemn cantillation but resolved itself before long into calisthenics instructions, and along with it the scent of laurels, although I was horrified to see that somebody had taken my shoes off, meaning that the stink of my spite-worm ulcer would soon overwhelm any natural perfume for about a hundred miles. Kubie was tonging ice into a glass of water from a brass bucket in the shape of a pineapple. ‘What happened just now?’ I said.
He handed me the glass. ‘You fainted, Mr Zonulet. I have your camera on my desk. I’m afraid the viewfinder is cracked. Do you feel all right? Perhaps you aren’t used to the summer climate here? I know it took me a long time to adjust after I transferred.’
I smiled. ‘I spend most of my time in the tropics, doctor. I ought to be able to deal with Texas.’ I was a pretty self-assured character, but if there was a degree of self-assurance so complete that you didn’t feel even a little uneasy about betraying signs of nervous debility in front of an admitting physician at a mental hospital, I had not yet attained it. ‘Maybe those pencils hit me harder than I thought.’
Pavo’s leeches were in dispute with the barometer. They were all crowded up at the top of the jar, practically banging their little heads against the lid in their desperation to evacuate. But my barometer showed only a small drop in pressure, not enough to augur a storm. And I couldn’t smell ozone on the dusk. Besides, I was impatient. The yield of my trip to Texas wasn’t doing any good sitting there beside me in a waterproof envelope.
Emmeline Sapp had not spoken a single word in my presence, consenting with only a nod when I asked if I could take her picture. As she regarded me with her large, dark, almost unblinking eyes, I was curious about what enduring link she might have to the temple, but I knew in the end it was of no importance. The following morning, I drove out west to the Goree State Farm for Women. ‘Keep on that road until you notice the cabbage fields are full of nurses,’ the warden’s secretary had told me on the phone, referring to the inmates’ white dresses. An actual nurse, from the infirmary, helped me choose a few women with burns, whelts or bruises that marred skin of Sapp’s approximate complexion, so that the photographs I took could attest to the electroshock treatments, tight leather restraints and punishment beatings she had supposedly endured. Later, I also forged a sheet of Carrotwood Hospital headed paper to type out a letter from its director stating that a request from the State Department would be sufficient for him to approve Miss Sapp’s immediate discharge. Clearly, Trimble intended to blackmail someone at the temple who knew Sapp. I hadn’t asked for details but I liked the shape of it. Again, the maxim at work: sometimes you just have to sever one tendon and all the rest will soon snap.
‘No deberías subir esta noche,’ Pavo said to me a second time as I slid the envelope into the supply crate. But nonetheless he helped me nail the crate shut before we carried it out to the deck of the barge to saddle it with its parachute. (Trimble kept nagging me to bri
ng him a linen suit, but although I was willing to provide small luxuries, I stopped short of anything that would advertise too glaringly that he had a supply line to the outside world.) The air felt calm to me – not calm as in ‘calm before the storm’ or ‘eerily calm’ or ‘too damned calm’ – just plain calm.
And that was how it stayed for the first couple hours of flight. By this stage of the Ebano Airlift, I’d had enough practice that I could grope through the moonless jungle as if it were an apartment with the lights off, and I never misidentified the temple in the liminal grain of the night. When the wind began to rise, I wasn’t concerned. ‘Remember, she’s a hundred-foot sail you can’t douse,’ Albee had said, but the ducted fans were powerful enough that I could maintain my bearing as long as I kept an eye on the instruments.
Except the wind kept on rising. Even from this altitude, over the drumming of the rain on the airship’s taut skin, I could hear the tidal roar of the highest trees straining the wind through their leaves. I turned up the burner in the hope of climbing out of the shear. But higher up it was just as bad. There was no thunder or lightning on the horizon; this wasn’t a public spectacle, just the exportation of a tremendous volume of air, after hours and off the books, lubricated by a little water.
I wasn’t far from the temple, and I wondered if I could at least keep control of the airship long enough to sight Trimble’s flare. Grip the wheel gently with your hands, grip the car sternly with your mind: that was my method on dicey roads, and it never failed. But after a few more minutes the storm was blowing so hard that the rudder was rendered ornamental, and so was the burner, and so was the pilot, really. I couldn’t see anything, and I couldn’t do anything, except cling to my black planet scudding through the void. By now I was willing to acknowledge that I should have trusted Pavo’s annelids.
Still, if I resigned any hope of getting the photographs to Trimble tonight, that didn’t leave me with much else to worry about, save the possibility that I wouldn’t make it back to the barge before daybreak. Even then, a few cattle farmers sighting an unidentified flying object wasn’t enough to compromise an operation like this. (Albee had a few stories to that effect.) Until the weather died down, I just had to concentrate on maintaining a running estimate of my coordinates. My left foot was feeling unpleasantly squelchy, so I unlaced my boot in order to change the dressing on my ulcer.
Then the shooting started.
When I heard the first rifle reports, I wasn’t sure if I was the target. But that question was answered in pretty short order by the spotlight. The beam wasn’t powerful, but it shone directly at my gondola, and against the surrounding darkness it was like an archangel’s lance. I couldn’t understand it, because if I knew anything about reckoning, there was no way I could have drifted within rifle range of the guerrilla training camp.
The next sound I heard was a heavy machine gun.
So I didn’t know anything about reckoning. Or at least not in a tempest. When I next ran into Albee I would have to ask him about replacing the directional gyroscope with a jar of leeches, fed on my own astute blood. The machine gun fired another burst. I couldn’t regard the controls as ornamental any longer, not if they could shift the airship even an inch. I emptied the ballast tanks, to gain altitude, and I hauled the rudder over as far as I could, to offer the vessel’s long side to the wind. That way, if the machine gunner had an advanced case of rheumatoid arthritis, I had a fair chance of evading his aim.
If he did not, however, the steel floor of the gondola was no protection against those .50 caliber rounds. No protection for me and no protection for the cotton envelope over my head. I glanced behind me. The spotlight was shining through a neat row of holes in the gondola’s floor. Those bullets would have gone through the envelope and out the other side. The airship would react to the leaks as ponderously as it did to the burner. But from now on it had only one vector.
Knowing I wouldn’t hear the shot that killed me, I pulled my boot back on, went around behind the pilot’s seat, and started unbuckling the supply crate. If nothing else, the exercise reassured me that, should it ever for any reason prove necessary, I would be capable of undoing eight brassieres in less than five seconds under heavy fire. I kicked the crate out of the back hatch, and felt the airship rise, although not as much as I wanted. Nobody shot at the crate as it fell. That was good. But behind me I heard the airship’s instrument panel shatter. As best I could, I strapped myself into a parachute harness that was designed for a cube. I cut the static line with my pocket knife, and jumped.
I counted one and two and halfway to three before I released my parachute, because I needed to drop out of the beam of the spotlight. That left me about four hundred feet from the ground, or about three hundred feet from the treetops, which was barely enough time for the parachute to deploy, let alone slow me down.
Those straps couldn’t have been quite even, because one of them yanked me under the armpit almost hard enough to dislocate my shoulder. Moments later, a gust of wind hit with such force that I felt like I was dangling from the string of a kite. The parachute was still opening and I was still descending, but simultaneously the whole tangle was being dragged over the roof of the forest.
For a short interval, the world was nothing but a maelstrom of speed, rain, darkness, gunfire, leaves, and I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Branches caned my feet and then my groin and then my face. Others just snapped under me. Now the canopy of my parachute was out of the wind and into the tree crowns, and this wasn’t a continuous fall any more so much as a rapid chain of physics interactions, like the collapse of a trestle bridge.
I was still alive, which meant I hadn’t smashed into any one of those tree trunks hard enough to break my neck. Of course, if the lines broke or the silk tore I was still a hundred feet off the ground. Or ninety feet now, eighty feet, seventy feet, because by slides and jerks and plunges I was moving down through the trees, though with less momentum each time, until at last the parachute found a set of branches that could be persuaded to share my entire weight.
There I hung, dizzy and limp, no better than a pouch full of bruises, an oversized fruit rotting on the vine. Rain tickled my face, and so did the last few leaves and flowers twirling down from where I’d ripped through the upper foliage. It made me think of the Chaplin movie where he got hoisted upside down from the bunting at the opening ceremony for the department store, except it wasn’t as funny.
I was still getting my breath back when I heard in the distance a minor arboreal cataclysm. The airship meeting the forest canopy. I didn’t know whether they’d seen me parachute from it, so I didn’t know whether anybody was going to come looking for me in this direction. If I needed to defend myself, against soldiers or jaguars, I had my semi-automatic and my pocket knife.
However, I didn’t have my flashlight, which I’d left behind in the gondola. I did have my Zippo, but unlike a flashlight it wouldn’t be much use held between my teeth, so I was going to have to climb down this tree in total darkness. Before I unbuckled myself from the harness, I searched with my foot for a supportive crotch between bough and trunk, and it wasn’t until then that I realised my left boot was gone. I hadn’t had time to lace it up before bailing out of the airship and it must have slipped off in the helter-skelter.
I started down the tree. A fall was more or less inevitable, but I managed to put it off for a while. Then a branch snapped off in my hand and I toppled backward out of the tree. But it was no more than fifteen feet down to the damp forest floor, the necessary epilogue of the four hundred.
Grunting with pain, I got to my feet. If I could reach the closest tributary of the Río Patuca, past the Pozkito dam, I could probably catch a boat to San Esteban. That would require me to make a wide loop around the guerrilla training camp to minimise the risk of running into one of their patrols. Trimble, who knew the terrain, could have guided me to safety, but I had no means of finding him.
I hobbled a short distance into the darkness, so
that I wouldn’t be directly underneath the black parachute draped across the trees. Then I sat down and rested until the sun began to rise on a purged and polished sky. I’d been to the Guaniguanico hills and the Petén lowlands and the Del Norte coast and of course Vansaska’s bungalow, but I’d never before been pulled so deep into what the pulp magazines used to call the green inferno. This certainly wasn’t my favored zone of operation, but the better I understood it the better I could traverse it, so despite all my aches and itches I tried to turn my concentration outwards, to become a TBX receiver, to tune into all the sounds and the smells, the covert radio broadcasts and propaganda campaigns and diplomatic cables that saturated every frequency of the rainforest. I also listened pretty hard for men with guns who might be coming to kill me.
After four or five hours, when it was light enough that I thought I might be able to distinguish leather from wood, I got up to empty my own ballast tank against the tree. Immediately my holster fell off. Checking the strap, I saw that one of the buckles had snapped, so I threw away the holster and stuffed my gun Mexican-style into the front of my waistband. Then I went off in search of my left boot.
I scanned down on the ground and up in the branches, starting along the path of my windfall, as best I could reconstruct it, and working outward from there. But I couldn’t find the fucking thing. My time was limited, because it was idiotic to stay so close to the parachute that marked my location like a pennant. And I was using stamina that I would need later. The storm had wickered the forest floor with dead branches, so that while I was searching my sock was reduced to tatters, and so was the dressing under that, and so was the scab under that. Also, I had to pull out a thorn that impaled my heel like a caltrop. My colleague Don Sturgis claimed to have trekked barefoot through the Burmese jungle for eight days in 1946. Adjusting for his usual hyperbole, he was probably talking about a long afternoon. Regardless, whether or not it was feasible in principle, what seemed to me much more likely in this case was that without a shoe I’d just get slower and slower until I couldn’t take another step. But I had no choice but to try. I took off my shirt, ripped off the right sleeve, knotted the sleeve around my sobbing ulcer, and put the shirt back on. That spite worm had really made its point.