by Ned Beauman
I think I’m in both years at once. Or maybe neither. It’s as if, every time I ingest the fungus, that’s a different entrance to the same place. The place where I am now.
There must be things you know in 1959 that you didn’t know in 1956.
Yes. I know the fungus I found in the temple is an argyrophage, just like the medium of cinema. An organism that feeds on silver. I know it gives you knowledge that you couldn’t have attained by any other means. Memories of events you weren’t present for. Surveillance tapes of people’s thoughts. That’s why it’s a spy’s supreme fantasy, and it’s what makes my memoir possible.
I also know that ten days after my airship crash, I woke up … or I will wake up … Let’s use the present tense: I wake up in a sickbed in Wilson’s embassy/brothel, just like Colby Droulhiole once did. I have no recollection of how I got there. Absolutely no recollection of how I got out of the temple, or how I evaded its inhabitants, or how I avoided the Pozkitos, or how I found my way to San Esteban. The conclusion I reach is that I must have done it all unconsciously. My intuition took control. The fungus made me capable of a kind of expert tactical sleepwalking, free from pain and fatigue and the cognitive bottleneck of conscious deliberation.
Wilson is anxious to know whether my employer, the firm of Letterblair, Handsom and Lowe, will compensate me reasonably for the injuries I have received in the course of performing my duties as a notary agent. He also asks whether I ever found Poyais O’Donnell, who still hasn’t been seen in San Esteban. He is too tactful even to allude to the fact that several months ago I disappeared with Colby Droulhiole in the middle of the night, smashing a window as I left.
Reyna put all my belongings in a drawer when she undressed me. Among them is a fragment of silver armor, caked in living fungus, that I must have brought with me from the temple. So I have a sample.
The problem is that, when I wake up in that sickbed, I’ve forgotten the vision I’m having right now. I’ve forgotten everything I’ve learned from this mingling between 1956 and 1959. Otherwise all the decisions I make in the intervening years would be different.
Do you know who I am?
‘If all that which is outside of me were destroyed, save only that God and myself were left …’ I went into the temple and now I’m talking to somebody. Jeepers creepers, are you …
Are you one of the Pozkito gods?
No.
Just kidding! I know you’re not. I don’t believe in them. When Whelt went into the temple, he inhaled the spores from the fungus growing on the silver armor, he had a psychotropic experience, and he thought he’d dropped in on some deities. He was always so proud of his rationalism, but the first time in his life he encountered something he couldn’t immediately explain, he just lunged for the supernatural.
Thank you. I wanted to get a sense of your subjective condition. That will help prevent any misunderstandings between us. This is the first time in several days you’ve been so lucid and I’m very keen to make the most of it.
What the hell do you mean, lucid?
I’ll ask you again: do you know where you are, Mr Zonulet? Try to concentrate. Can you see this desk? Can you see that door? Can you see yourself in that mirror?
This isn’t the desk I have in my apartment.
You’re not in your apartment. You’re in a psychiatric observation room in Camp Detrick in Maryland.
The mirror. That’s a Fourth Wall, isn’t it? It’s one-way. There are people behind it, watching us?
I want you to listen to me carefully. You are a research liaison working with Apex Chemical on behalf of the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Three weeks ago you removed a vial of Halorite 1219 without authorisation from one of the laboratories here at Camp Detrick. We don’t know what you were planning on doing with it. The vial broke inside your briefcase, and when you opened the briefcase you inhaled a huge dose of the drug.
Halorite 1219 is a fire retardant.
No, Mr Zonulet, Halorite 1219 is not a fire retardant, it is a powerful experimental drug. And since you inhaled it you have been in a state of hallucinatory catatonia.
I’m with the Directorate of Operations, not OSI. I’ve never even been to Camp Detrick.
Try to concentrate on what you see in this room. Try to concentrate on me and my voice. I’m your doctor. This is reality. Everything is a fantasy. There is no temple. You’ve never been to Honduras. None of these characters you’ve invented are real.
Oh, I get it. This is an interrogation. Listen, buddy, I’ve read the manual too. I know what you’re doing. ‘The “confusion technique” is designed not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird.’
Throughout your account of the last twenty years there are assertions both major and minor which stand in demonstrable contradiction to the facts of history.
You’re talking to a veteran of OSS and CIA about ‘the facts of history’? Come on. You may as well hang it up. This isn’t going to work.
Actually, we are still very hopeful that your condition will improve. We are considering a number of treatments. There’s a new procedure called the unilateral gradatorectomy. It’s produced excellent results at other institutions in cases similar to your own. It might be that you need only a straightforward surgery and afterwards you will see the world clearly again. That would be worth any side effects, wouldn’t it?
Now, say I did believe you were a Pozkito god. I’d conclude you were trying to send me out of your temple screaming and raving. But I think I know what’s really happening. Yes, the Halorite 1219 is the likely culprit here – that much we can agree on. The fire retardant did something to the fungus on the film. It queered the chemistry. If you looked at the spores under a microscope you’d probably see they were all fucked up like Hiroshima babies. That’s why I’m having bad dreams this time.
Please sit down, Mr Zonulet.
Who’s on the other side of that mirror? Who’s watching me? Hello in there!
Put down the chair. If you don’t put it down immediately I will call for the guards to restrain you.
You’d better get out of the way. This is going to be all about the swing.
You’ve been in rooms like this before. You must know the Fourth Wall is unbreakable.
No harm in trying.
Put down the chair. Put it down. Hey, send someone in here! Send someone in before he—
The glass shatters.
Phibbs looks down and sees the pair of eyeglasses on the carpeted floor of the office, one lens crunched under his shoe. ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that, sir. Did Mr Barry leave these behind?’
‘He did,’ says Elias Coehorn Sr. His previous visitor, E.W. Barry, is the president of the Atlantic National Bank, and today, September 3rd, 1938, it has fallen to Coehorn to decide whether that institution should survive. During their interview just now, Barry did so much agonised fidgeting with the glasses in his lap that he bent them at the hinges. When he was getting ready to leave he put them back on, but as he rose from his chair they slipped off his head. Instead of stooping down to pick them up, he just wavered for a moment and then backed out of the room. If Coehorn read his defeated expression correctly, this was because Barry had come to feel that in the prevailing psychic atmosphere it was impossible for him to do anything whatsoever without first asking Coehorn for permission, and since he couldn’t bring himself to ask permission to pick up his glasses, he had no choice but to leave them behind.
Now Phibbs deposits them in a wastepaper basket. ‘Are there any other matters to which you’d like me to attend in consequence of the meeting, sir?’
For a few minutes Coehorn gives detailed instructions. He has known for months, of course, that the Atlantic National Bank is rotten through its heartwood; most likely he knew before Barry did. The man had come here to beg him to save the tree. In fact, all he achieved was to alert Coehorn that this is the last possible moment to give the tree a gentle push. Thus he can determine the angle of its fall. Afterwards he says, �
�What have you got for me?’ referring to the document wallet under Phibbs’s arm.
‘Three items. First, this month’s report from the inquisitors.’
‘Anything in it?’
‘Nothing to speak of, no.’
Coehorn has long since given up taking personal meetings with the Christian ‘visionaries’ who offer their gifts to his Missionary Foundation. For years he harbored such high hopes for them, but in fact they have always been frauds, every single one of them, including those endorsed by pastors and deacons. Although his small team of trained inquisitors still conduct scientific interviews with the more plausible candidates in the tri-state area, even that has become a redundant measure. For Coehorn himself has now been blessed with the direct revelation which so many others only counterfeited.
When he was a young man, certain Bible passages already hummed on the page like telegraph wires bringing him a personal message – for example, the reassurance that if you pay your tithe to the church the Lord will ‘open to you the windows of heaven and pour out all the blessings you need’ (Malachi 3:10), because the Lord too is economically rational. When Coehorn was still brewing pard liquor in Hershey, the Lord knew that his ‘tithe’ would one day comprise one of the largest missionary foundations in the world and a program of church renovations across the United States. But evidently Coehorn’s work is not yet done, because the Lord still has instructions for him. He doesn’t hear them articulated in words, but in a concrete sense of mission that arrives from outside himself. Though there is no voice, the non-voice has its own timbre and he shudders with the holiness of it.
Outside the windows, a warm gray haze is draped over the tops of the nearby skyscrapers, which seen from this height have the disordered, jostling quality of shanties in a slum. ‘Next?’ he says.
‘The latest report on Master Whelt, sir.’
Jervis Whelt. Twenty years old. A resident of Hollywood, Los Angeles. Elias Coehorn Sr.’s only son by blood. An error twice over.
The first error was the misallocation of seed. When Coehorn raped Arnold Spindler’s wife, the woman herself was of no importance. Like a speaker in tongues, she was only a conduit for a word sent down from above, in this case a word of penalty. Coehorn was interfering with Spindler’s property just as Spindler had interfered with Coehorn’s, and he never bothered to look Spindler’s wife in the face when he did it, any more than he met the eye of Elias Jr.’s pet dog when he broke its neck to punish him for persistent blasphemy. The rape was a performance for Spindler’s benefit, nothing more. That the banal fact of anatomical conjunction might have substantive results would never have crossed Coehorn’s mind. How absurd it now seems that he should have given his seed to his own wife Ada almost a dozen times in the course of their marriage without any procreative yield, and it only took one quite incidental jettison to put a child in Spindler’s. Then again, it must be remembered that Spindler’s wife was Jewish too, and a Jewess’s loins will gorge on sperm like a bat sucking up nectar.
In 1918, Coehorn didn’t yet realise that Ada had never actually borne him an heir. Here is the second error. The rape should never have taken place. Had he known at the time that Spindler’s trespass inside her was not, as Ada so convincingly pleaded with all her theatrical training, a first instance there in the dressing room after the rehearsal, but in fact a regularity stretching back at least seven years – had he known, a hundred times worse, that Spindler had placed a cuckoo in his nest – then Coehorn would never have taken such a lenient measure as merely to rape Spindler’s wife in front of him while he struggled and howled. Not until years later did he recognise his ‘son’ as an interloper, and so not until then did he visit a more appropriate punishment on Spindler. He should never have been merciful in the first place. (Now, as Barry’s broken glasses lie in his wastebasket like a carpal bone spat out after the devouring of a fresh kill, he knows he has not made that error since and never will again.)
The symmetry of Coehorn impregnating Spindler’s wife just as Spindler had already impregnated Coehorn’s was on every level an accident. Whelt was a misbegetting based on a misallocation based on a misapprehension.
And yet the boy lives and Coehorn lives in him.
He knew nothing of Whelt’s existence until four years ago, when the discovery was made in the following roundabout fashion. After Spindler’s widow, residing by that time in La Jolla, California, died of breast cancer, agents from the Eastern Aggregate Good Conduct Division were sent to burglarise her house as a precaution. They removed any papers they could find whose absence would not be too conspicuous to her executors. No new information could be permitted to come to light that might complicate the job of the actor who had been posing as Arnold Spindler since the sabotage of Spindler’s airship in 1929. Spindler had been exhaustively researched, of course. Through the plenitude of his Good Conduct Division dossier, which ran to thousands of pages, the man was more fully realised in death than most ordinary men are even in life. But it was still possible that some inconvenient new detail might scuttle out of the widow’s house. What if it turned out that according to medical records, say, Spindler had once been told by his doctor that he was badly allergic to salicornia, and some very diligent reporter noticed that this stood in mysterious contradiction to the boxes of sea beans that were delivered to the kitchens of his Bel Air mansion every week of the summer? So the agents searched the widow’s house overnight. And among the documents they removed was one suggesting that in 1919, about nine months after Coehorn raped her, she had signed over a male newborn to an orphanage in Hollywood.
Phibbs located the boy. And the instant Coehorn set eyes on a photograph of Jervis Whelt, he knew he was looking at a son. A genetic son, not like Elias Jr., whose face, when a belated puberty at last sieved some determinate features from the mush of his boyhood, was blatantly recognizable as an iteration of Spindler’s. (Although Spindler, thank goodness, did not have a characteristic Jewish nose or hair, otherwise the situation would have been obvious to any onlooker.)
So the convention would be to say that Whelt is Coehorn’s only son by blood. But there are other bloods. Name is blood. Faith is blood. Money is blood. The majority of Coehorn’s legacy will be accomplishments of mind and spirit, not of animal fluids hand-delivered. To privilege the latter above all else is ape-minded and profane, and he believes that, in the future, few among the American gentry will bother to conceive their own children. That Elias Jr. wasn’t made in Coehorn’s image is not in itself reason enough to disinherit him. After all, New York wasn’t originally made in Coehorn’s image either. He imposed his image on it and now he precedes the city’s founders in importance if not in tenure.
Yet Ada’s adulterine, raised since birth as a Coehorn, has thrown away that great gift, keeping only the gilt wrapping. As surely as he is a Spindler in his face, he is a Spindler in his character, which has drooped towards the fancy, the painted, the decadent, just like any theatrical. Elias Jr. is now twenty-six and Coehorn is more disgusted by him every year. Whereas Jervis Whelt, by all accounts, delights in hard work and self-improvement. He is obsessed with motion pictures, yes, and not much of a Christian, but that’s because he had the misfortune to grow up a mile south of Sunset Boulevard.
While the cuckoo wastes Coehorn’s money and joyrides his name, the bastard is kept ignorant of his origins. To this extent the Coehorn inheritance is confused. But soon it must be settled for good. He built Eastern Aggregate to perdure beyond a mortal lifetime. Rome fell when the empire ceased to expand, but this empire must expand forever. There are other empires – not just Rockefeller and Mellon and Ford, the usual idiots, but darker empires, secret empires – and when they press up against his borders, his borders must press back harder.
He needs a successor.
Either he must extend his twenty-six-year investment in the child who came out of his late wife, who is known by society as his son, who even now could perhaps be trained into a worthy heir if he were taken away from the cit
y and confined for a number of years in a strict corrective setting; or he must upturn the whole business and summon a young Angeleno to the throne, acknowledging the slip-slop of patrimony for all to gawk over.
He flips through the report. There has been no change in Whelt’s circumstances. He’s still teaching evening classes about motion pictures at the Hancock Park Technical High School. In each of the classes an agent from the Good Conduct Division has been placed undercover as a student, although those agents have been told nothing about Whelt except that he is a person of interest to the company. Coehorn understands that, in Hollywood, people don’t expect to advance by enterprise and virtue, they expect to be ‘noticed’ or ‘discovered’, to be raised from the dust to sit with the kings. No doubt Whelt has the sense to resist this fantasy, and yet funnily enough it describes just what will happen if Coehorn chooses him over Elias Jr.
His most recent instructions from on high have alerted him that he musn’t prevaricate any longer. ‘The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness’ (Psalms 18:20), because the Lord, like capitalism, is concerned with the proper allocation of resources and opportunities. The parable of the prodigal son might seem superficially relevant here, and likewise the Deuteronomic law of the inheritance of the firstborn, but in truth neither has any direct application in this case. Coehorn has become convinced that he must take his model from Solomon, not the famous story about the disputed baby but his general method. The Lord wants him to find some means of testing one almost-son against the other almost-son. This competition, whatever it is, will need to take place somewhere far from New York or Los Angeles, so that each of them will start on equal footing and nobody else will interfere until it is over.