by Ned Beauman
Then I heard whistling.
Although I didn’t recognise the tune, it sounded to me like an air on a jazz scale. I dropped to a crawl and moved towards it as quietly as I could.
Between the tree trunks there came into view a boy, Caucasian, digging up what might have been a cassava. I knew that both American camps sent out dozens of gardeners, foragers, hunters and trappers every day. This one was around fourteen or fifteen and dressed in a style that was familiar from my first sight of Droulhiole.
Most importantly, he was wearing handmade leather sandals, and he had big feet for his age. When opportunity knocked, you had to be ready to rob it at gunpoint.
But as I reached for my semi-automatic, I recalled Droulhiole’s wonderment at my Zippo. If this boy had also been born here at the temple, the crack of rifle fire echoing across the hills would be familiar to him, but he never would have seen so much as a picture of a pistol. Unless I were able to screen for his benefit a short educational film on the principles of gunpowder propulsion, he would have no reason to be afraid of my shiny tube. And I didn’t have even a pinch of benzoic oxymorphone.
Instead, I tossed a handful of sticks so they clattered against a tree over the boy’s head. As he looked up, I picked up a heavy broken bough in both hands like a baseball bat, and sprang forward out of cover. I was just about to swing when somebody shouted ‘Hey!’ and grabbed me from behind.
Whoever he was, this guy was big, so big that it was embarrassing not to have noticed he was in the vicinity. The zbyszko wrenched the bough out of my hands and at the same time clamped me across the shoulders. Restrained like that, I couldn’t turn around or raise a pistol, so instead I reached for my pocket-knife, flicked it open one-handed, and thrust it backward into his thigh. He yowled, and I broke out of his hold – right into the boy’s fist under my nose. The punch, which threw me off balance, wasn’t bad for a beginner, but then his friend, as if to say, ‘Here, kid, watch how it’s really done,’ pulled me around to deliver an uppercut so hard it could have given my lumber barge a concussion.
What woke me was emerging from the forest into the unobstructed sunlight of the temple clearing. I still didn’t know the coordinates of my parachute landing, but they must have been carrying me for quite a while to get here. The boy had my feet and the zbyszko had me under the armpits, so I was facing forward. Never before had I seen the temple in the daytime. And right away I became concerned that for the last several months I had been devoting myself to securing control of an insane asylum.
The atmosphere of the site reminded me of the Lovelinch Institute crossed with the Goree State Farm. We were approaching from the north, so the temple faced us with its flat looming middle. Though I was still woozy, I could see at once that the whole Eastern Aggregate camp was arranged in reference to the temple. By that I don’t just mean that, self-evidently, if the temple hadn’t been there, the camp wouldn’t have been there either. By that I mean that the infrastructure of the camp – not only its cabins and sheds but also its stools and firepits and water butts – expressed an attitude of obsessive, almost worshipful concentration on this wall that kept nothing in and nothing out, this cliff that gave shadow but no shelter, this huge, inert, purposeless blockage, as if, for the residents, it was more fundamental to their balance than the sky or the horizon. Through the camp moved men, women, and quite a few children, in their blurred simulacra of American clothing and haircuts. Like Kubie’s patients they seemed to have disappeared beyond rescue into the mysteriously significant world they had made.
Yet, as I observed them heating water or butchering meat or clearing storm debris or performing various small tedious actions that might have involved braiding or peeling or grinding or whittling, I could detect even from this distance an earnestness, an absorption, a gravity, and I realised that if all this was a derangement, it was a derangement I respected. They had held on for eighteen years, not only these New Yorkers but also the Angelenos living up there on the most geometrically inconvenient surface imaginable (assuming there wasn’t some lost Mayan torus or hyperboloid even deeper in the jungle). I would have been proud to count myself capable of the same. After all, what was it about the pyramids and wats of dead civilizations that inspired such admiration in the tourist, if not the sense of an entire population neglecting its own immediate needs to labor in service of an idea?
I could feel my gun still in my waistband, the butt under my shirt. My porters hadn’t searched me, or at least not very well.
An epidemic of double-takes spread through the camp as they carried me down a central thoroughfare. Everyone who saw me broke off from their work to stare. On my left I observed a cabin with a row of clothed dummies on its veranda like a tailor’s shop, and on my right about half a dozen banquet tables on wooden decking with a stage at the far end like a nightclub. ‘He’s awake,’ said the zbyszko. ‘Drop him.’ The boy did so, after which I was manipulated until I was down on my knees. ‘Get the boss.’ The boy ran off. As a reporter for the New York Evening Mirror, I’d never actually met Elias Coehorn Jr., but I’d seen him around, so I knew to expect a less Jewish version of the radio crooner Frank Parker.
Except that the guy who arrived next, at the head of an entourage of four (including the boy), was not Coehorn. He was around forty, and he had what I recognised as a certain kind of authoritative ex-military bearing, that of the discharged officer who has no intention of walking around like a clockwork drummer boy for the rest of his life but is nonetheless capable of growing about a foot in height and clipping a march into his step whenever he feels like some of the old postural equipment might be put to good use. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Where did you come from?’ He had a German accent. Only his gappy teeth detracted from his impressiveness.
‘I prefer to shake hands when I introduce myself,’ I said, ‘but this lug isn’t giving me the chance. You run this place?’
‘Of course he does,’ said the zbyszko. ‘Answer Herr Meinong’s questions.’ He gave my arms a yank.
Meinong held up a gentling palm. ‘I merely assist Mr Coehorn where I can,’ he said, in a tone connoting a polite fiction. ‘You’re American?’
‘Correct.’ I was irritated, if not particularly surprised, to find out that Trimble had been lying to me. In his accounts of the power structure of the two camps, no Herr Meinong had ever been mentioned.
‘You were on the aircraft that crashed in the jungle last night, I think?’ Meinong said. ‘The soldiers shot you down.’ He didn’t have the accent of the immigrant German who learned English in America, but of the educated German who learned it in gymnasium. By now we were ringed by gawkers, standing well back.
I nodded. ‘That’s why I hope you can forgive the misunderstanding I had with your friends here. Fraught circumstances, rash actions. You know how it is. But it wasn’t at all the first impression I wanted to make. Because, from what I know of your situation out here, I believe I can be of some help.’
Meinong licked his lips, making a calculation. ‘Gag him,’ he said. The order was so abrupt that no one seemed to understand it right away. ‘One of you. Get a rag – anything. Gag him. Right away, please.’
There was a fuss of activity in the entourage. I wondered why Meinong wanted this interrogation to end before it even began.
Then I remembered Trimble’s references to the ‘German–American Alliance’. And I formed a pretty compelling theory. ‘But I’ve got so much to tell you all,’ I said. ‘I have word from back home.’
At that, the fuss halted, and even the guy I’d recently stabbed let his grip on my arms relax. Before me I saw ravenous expressions. Only three of them looked so desperate for news from outside, though. Not the boy, who was merely curious. And not Meinong, who was merely agitated.
‘I know you haven’t had any other visitors for a while,’ I added. ‘Not since Herr Meinong, late of the “German–American Alliance”, turned up here in the tropics. In around ’45 or ’46. Have I got that right?’
&nbs
p; Meinong asked, ‘Did you search him?’
I jerked both my hands free, drew my Browning, and shot him point-blank in the face.
I knew the instant the gun went off that I’d been irresponsible. Not because I felt any uncertainty whatsoever about Meinong: I had seen in his reaction that he knew that I knew what he was. Only because it would have been more productive to hold him at gunpoint instead.
But it was an instinct over which I could exert no discipline. Many of my colleagues, after the war, had been perfectly happy to recruit any surviving Nazi who had military or scientific intelligence to offer, as long he was willing to promise that he did not intend to establish a Fourth Reich within the current fiscal year. Not me, though. Not ever. In Europe with OSS, I’d seen a few things.
My hope was that anybody who’d watched it happen would be too surprised to react immediately. And indeed, as I took off running towards a gap in the ring of spectators, nobody moved fast enough to stop me. I was heading for the treeline, and I thought I would make it easily.
Then I passed a cabin and found myself face to face with four guys. Two carried spears and two carried bows and arrows. A hunting party.
‘Stop him!’ came the yell.
I had no choice but to veer left, even though that was towards the temple. An arrow swished past my head. I was running so fast I smashed straight into a bamboo rack on which an animal skin was being dried or stretched, but it slowed me down only for a moment.
Nobody was paralysed by shock any longer. In fact, glancing back over my shoulder, I saw villagers were converging on me from every direction. Even if I tried to round the temple right at the corner, I would be blocked. I hadn’t expected them to be so efficiently synchronised, but, then again, these were people who had hunted peccary through the rainforest with Bronze Age weapons for the last eighteen years. I was going to be trapped against the temple’s blank wall, and I only had twelve rounds left in my magazine.
Some sort of heavy rigging ran up the full height of the temple. At the bottom was a wooden pallet, with two barrels on it, under ropes stretched taut from each of the four corners to a knot in the middle. At the top, another pallet, also loaded. That gave me an idea. But not a good one.
I spun around. About forty defensive ends were about to pile on the quarterback. There was only one direction I could go. So I made for those barrels.
I had never really understood how pulleys and blocks and tackles worked. But an elevator attendant at the Waldorf-Astoria had once explained to me the principle of counterweights, in the most general terms, years ago, when I was whiffled. And that’s what I was relying on when I stepped on to the pallet and pushed both barrels over.
Water flooded out of the barrels as they rolled onto the ground. And the pallet, relieved of its weight, creaked into the air.
Hoping to the bottom of my heart that I had given that elevator attendant a good tip, I dropped to a prone position on the pallet. If I got to the top, maybe I could ask for asylum with the other camp.
I’d assumed the counterweight would plunge at more or less the rate of free-fall, and my pallet would rise up the temple at the same pace, but in fact the ascent was far too leisurely for comfort. Maybe there was some sort of brake on the rope to prevent either pallet from gaining too much speed before it hit the ground. Still, mine was going in the right direction.
At first the archers below sent arrow after arrow rapping at the bottom of the pallet. But then they started aiming for the rope over my head. A few arrows bounced down around me, and these I snapped in half and threw over the side. The quantity seemed to be easing off, though, perhaps because it was too dangerous to collect them for reshoots while they were still falling from the sky like bullets at a Serbian wedding.
Then, when I was about halfway up the side of the temple, an arrow sliced through one of the ropes connecting the corners of the pallet to the hook. I had to throw all my weight to the opposite corner so that the pallet didn’t tip me off the side.
Now I was eighty feet from the top of the temple and they still hadn’t made another lucky shot. Seventy feet. Sixty feet. This whole mission had been a treatise on altitude and podiatry.
An arrow notched the rope just above the knot. It held, but the last fibers were screaming in agony. I couldn’t keep my weight on this pallet any longer.
I stepped sideways off the pallet and on to the temple itself. Disencumbered, the pallet bumped against the limestone as it lifted past me. I started to climb.
The muscles I’d developed climbing rock faces in the Valle de Viñales had not completely atrophied. And, like anything torn in half, this side of the temple was so ragged that the limestone was generous with handholds and footholds. But it had a damp coat of moss. Except for my right boot, my hands and feet were bare and sweaty. And I was in too much haste to test each hold. I couldn’t have given odds on whether I would slip before I was hit by an arrow, but either way I knew I had no realistic chance of covering the whole forty vertical feet. It would be extremely frustrating, I thought, if I didn’t live to tell McKellar this story, which was already one of my better ones.
An arrow took off the top of my left ear. I kept climbing.
And then I found the gap.
It wasn’t just an especially luxurious handhold – it was so tall and wide and deep that I could fit my shoulders in there. If it wasn’t an escape, it might at least be a foxhole. I hauled myself inside.
I smelled a musty odor like soil and truck exhaust, without the tang of guano you would have expected. I squirmed forward until both of my feet were inside with me. Blood was streaming from my ear so I tried to pinch the skin closed. For a little while I lay there getting my breath back. Next time I was in Foggy Bottom I would have to apply to the Technical Services Division for a new body. This one would cost more to repair than it would to replace.
In the dungeon light from the entrance I could see that this wasn’t just an alcove. In fact, it looked like it widened as it sloped down into the innards of the temple.
I couldn’t go back. So I went forward. ‘Suppose that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception,’ Leibniz writes in the Monadology, ‘we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until a man was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill …’
* * *
Do you know where you are?
No.
Do you know what year it is?
It’s either 1956 or 1959. It could be that it’s 1956 and I’m having a vision of something that will happen in 1959. Or it could be that it’s 1959 and I’m having a flashback to something that happened in 1956. I can’t tell.
What’s the very last thing you remember happening to you?
There are two very last things. The last thing I remember in 1959 is licking the film. For almost twenty-four hours before that I’d been writing my memoir. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I just sat in my apartment and typed. I was so frightened that I might have murdered Frieda that I put myself into a fugue of nostalgia so I wouldn’t have to think about it. I shut off the present and went back to writing about the past. My own past this time, nobody else’s. The years I chose, they were the years when I was still free, still dauntless, still a hero to myself. But they were also the years when I made the decisions that led to this terminus.
I started with my first meeting with Wilson, but then I realised I’d better explain what we learned when we interrogated Tapscott. From there I kept writing in more or less chronological order until, in my narrative, I was inside the temple, about to inhale the fungus for the first time.
I wanted to remind myself exactly what that felt like. And I had a few crumbs of fungus there in front of me, on the frames of film that I smuggled back from the warehouse. The Halorite 1219 fire retardant is toxic. Meaning the fungus from Honduras shouldn’t have been able to survive, let alone grow, while the film was sitting in that warehouse. But it did.
So right now I’m
sitting at my desk. It’s a few minutes since I put those frames in my mouth, as if sucking tarnish off a mirror. I’m talking to you, and at the same time I’m having an extraordinarily vivid memory of going into that temple in Honduras in 1956.
What’s the last thing you remember in 1956?
I was crawling deeper and deeper into the temple, like that blue spite worm boring into my foot. There was no light any more, but I kept going. My fingers kept brushing metal. The Mayans must have left a few trinkets behind. The metal had something on its surface, though, a thin layer of something spongy like mold. And I was starting to feel a change in my consciousness. Of course, I’m exhausted, and torn up, and I probably have a zoo of infections in my blood. But it wasn’t just that. I’m no beatnik, but I’ve smoked opium and hashish and sewing-machine oil before, and maybe that’s the best way to explain what it felt like when it started, except it also didn’t feel like that in the least. It started to become so intense that I wasn’t even sure whether I was still moving or whether I’d stopped somewhere.
So right now I’m in the temple. It’s been a few minutes since I first felt something gritty in my lungs. I’m talking to you, and at the same time I’m having this extraordinarily vivid dream of sitting in some shithole of an apartment in Virginia in 1959. ‘Were I able to consider directly all that happens or appears to me at the present time,’ Leibniz says, ‘I should be able to see all that will happen to me or that will ever appear to me. This future will not fail me, and will surely appear to me even if all that which is outside of me were destroyed, save only that God and myself were left.’