Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Three years ago, you sat on my bed and told me you’d take me to the tropics any time I wanted.’

  ‘That was before the tribunal. If I leave the country while the proceedings are still underway, they’ll tell me I’ve forfeited all kinds of rights. They’ll have my ass when I get back. That’s just what they want.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Instead of meeting my eye he took a bite of his hamburger.

  I took a bite of mine. I must have grimaced. ‘This is ungodly.’

  ‘This is better than usual. Why don’t you just go down there on your own?’

  ‘I need your help. You’ve been to Tegucigalpa before. I don’t even speak Spanish.’

  Neither of us were being entirely frank. I don’t need his help. I can go and find O’Donnell on my own. Yes, it will run more smoothly if he comes with me. But that is not why I want him to. I want him to come with me because if I can get him out of this apartment, out of that warehouse, I believe I will have done a good thing.

  Two objections might be raised here, both of them appeals to symmetry.

  When he invited me to go to the jungle, I said no. So why should he say yes?

  When he had the opportunity to help me, he did not. So why should I help him?

  You might say he was trying to help me when he invited me to go to the jungle. And I will not dispute that he meant well. But he was asking a woman in the deepest trench of her depression to overcome, spontaneously, capriciously, an inner obstacle so fundamental that it stood not as a counterargument but as an axiom that preceded all arguments. ‘No. No. I cannot go to the jungle just now.’

  That invitation was not useful. What would have been useful, very useful indeed – and I know that he understood this because he says so in the typescript I am presently defacing – would have been to tell me something I didn’t already know about Hearts in Darkness. That story was, and is, the sole nutrient on which my body seems capable of feeding. It is only due to the progress I have made on that story over the past few months that I now feel stronger than I have in many years.

  That is what I mean when I say he had the opportunity to help me and did not. So, again, why should I help him?

  Perhaps because it is important, sometimes, to show there is another way of doing things.

  However, if I’ve conceded that back in Silver Lake in ’56 I could not possibly have been persuaded to overcome my emotional block (to use a phrase that reminds me of a time when I could afford an analyst) then why should I expect Zonulet to be any more obliging now?

  As I say: when we discussed it over hamburgers, I was not being honest about my reasons for asking him, and he was not being honest about his reasons for declining.

  I said, ‘You don’t want to go back to Honduras.’

  He did not answer.

  I said, ‘In the letter your friend Wilson says something happened at the temple the year before last.’

  He did not answer.

  I said, ‘What happened at the temple? And what did you have to do with it?’

  * * *

  Meinong had never been shot in the face before.

  Later, what he would remember most vividly was not the impact or the pain – because he’d experienced those before, when he was almost killed under artillery bombardment at Weidesheim – but rather the extraordinarily disconcerting sensation of blood pouring into his mouth, out of the exit wound in the back of his head, and down the back of his neck. He lay helpless on the ground but he never lost consciousness, so he could hear the tumult as I ran off in the direction of the temple.

  Right away he understood there were two paths he could take. In principle his authority here was guaranteed by wealth, but in practice, like all authority, it functioned in basically mythic terms. Now that the camp had witnessed him felled, he could either lie for weeks in the infirmary hut, a mere invalid praying for a minimum of sepsis and disfigurement; or he could rise like an immortal, speak in a voice louder than the report of that bullet, foreclose all doubt in the extremity of his response.

  For some time now he had been enclosing the New York camp in his grasp. Ever since Trimble came to him in the forest and proposed a partnership.

  That afternoon, eight months ago, he was out for a stroll. Far overhead, masking the breaks in the canopy, moths were making an immense migration in tattered black vortices and billows. Once again, his mind was on the question of how much longer to stay at the temple. Even now, an expedition might very well be on its way here from the United States. He had meant to intercept Colby Droulhiole just as he’d intercepted Walter Pennebaker a decade earlier. But he had failed, because he hadn’t counted on the preternatural facility with which the boy moved through the jungle. Meinong’s prey had escaped without ever knowing he was being pursued. So the seal on the outpost was broken. There were many other obstacles between here and Hollywood, of course, but if Droulhiole had even made it as far as San Esteban, then news of the Americans at the temple would at last have reached the outside world, and after that it was only a matter of time before Meinong’s sanctuary was overrun.

  Not that he needed it so badly any more. By now, Western capitalism would have moved on to some new crisis, the Jews would have wrung every last drop of sympathy from whatever exaggerated version of their hardships they had confected amongst themselves, and only the most intransigent political nostalgists would still be interested in prosecuting the misdemeanors of another era. Of all that he was confident. Even so, the revelation of the state of affairs here at the temple would be sure to attract a good deal of international publicity, and just to be safe he would prefer to slip away beforehand. Perhaps it was time to return to the Fatherland at last. Some new papers were all that would be required.

  ‘Hey.’ A hiss from the trees.

  Meinong turned, and Leland Trimble stepped out into the open.

  He wore cotton socks and cotton underpants, with a pocked and scarified face and torso, long matted hair but not much of a beard. ‘Do you remember me?’ he said. ‘If you don’t, I won’t take it personal. I was going out right when you were coming in.’

  Naturally, Meinong did recall Trimble’s banishment, which had sent both camps into convulsions only days after he had first arrived here. Later, it would occur to him that this timing was one of the reasons why Trimble had chosen him as a confederate: Meinong had less acquaintance with Trimble, and therefore less hatred of him, than any other adult at the temple. Even Coehorn, who had opposed Trimble’s expulsion at the time, had gradually soaked up the consensus opinion, and now talked as if he’d been wary of Trimble long before anyone else.

  ‘I’m quite surprised to see you, Mr Trimble,’ Meinong said. ‘I believe the general assumption was that you had gone a long way away from here.’

  ‘No, I decided to stick around.’ He didn’t seem to be able to make continuous eye contact, but instead just flicked his gaze at Meinong every so often, like fingertips testing a hot stovetop.

  ‘For ten years?’

  ‘Would you believe it?’ Smiling, Trimble nodded down at himself. ‘All that time and my suit still ain’t back from the cleaners.’ In his right hand he held a bundle of rayon, which he now presented to Meinong. ‘Take a look at that, Mr Meinong.’

  It was a large sum of Eastern Aggregate scrip. ‘You wish to buy something from me?’ said Meinong, puzzled.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah – perhaps you wish me to buy something on your behalf?’

  ‘Snip snap, you got it in two,’ Trimble said. ‘Yeah, I want you to buy something. I want you to buy the temple.’ He smiled. ‘I’d do it myself, but I got a real peachy reunion planned with the old gang, and I don’t like to be precocious. When Chick Bullock came back to one-night-only at the Lollipop for the first time in four years, you didn’t see him working the coat-check the evening before, if you see my meaning.’

  Meinong did not. Regardless, Trimble made his proposal. He claimed to have access to
an unlimited source of Eastern Aggregate scrip, supplementary to, but indistinguishable from, the fixed quantity that had circulated around both camps over the years. Never in his conversation with Meinong did he acknowledge outright that almost everybody at the temple wished him dead, but plainly he was aware that he couldn’t operate there in person. So he wanted to go into partnership with Meinong.

  The current economic situation at the temple was the reverse of what it had been at the time of Trimble’s departure. Back in 1946, the Hearts in Darkness camp was still in a long depression, whereas the Eastern Aggregate camp was in a condition of exuberant prosperity that could be traced all the way back to the punitive schedule of ransom payments they’d extracted in return for the release of the two men caught trying to steal ammonia from Coehorn’s ice-making machine. In the multivalent amnesty that flowered from Trimble’s exile, however, all debts were cancelled, while trade between the two camps was liberalised and Eastern Aggregate scrip dollars gained in value after the Angelenos came to accept them as legal tender.

  Over the ensuing period – as a year so prodigiously dry that the whole jungle seemed to brown at the edges passed into one as prodigiously wet – the economic standings of the camps swapped over yet again. After his descent into the temple, Whelt released from their obligations all of the Hearts in Darkness crew members who weren’t involved in the manufacture of silver-nitrate film. Since he was now more or less the sole contributor to the progress of the movie, it no longer made any difference to him whether the others were fed and clothed, so he willingly abdicated the last of his authority over his camp. Under Burlingame’s unhindered leadership – which turned out to be surpassingly astute, conscientious, and decisive – the Angelenos thrived; whereas the New Yorkers still had Coehorn, more complacent than ever. Before long, the generous, even charitable terms of exchange that Burlingame offered were all that was keeping the Eastern Aggregate camp from famine. The tribe held together, but, within it, Coehorn was now an object of toleration at best, contempt at worst.

  So Trimble’s plan was sound. If you had the funds, you could establish as far-reaching and discreet an influence over the camp and its chief as the Rothschilds had over Great Britain and its Prime Ministers.

  ‘How will you know I’m not just keeping the scrip for myself?’ Meinong said.

  ‘I’ll be vigilating,’ Trimble said. ‘You won’t see me, but you can be sure I’ll be vigilating.’

  For the moment, Meinong decided, he would put aside his return to Germany.

  The night after that unexpected meeting in the forest, he spoke to Coehorn, the two of them alone together in the presidential cabin, their faces lit by just one measly tallow candle. Meinong suggested a mutually beneficial arrangement. He told Coehorn he could subsidise him with enough scrip for the princeling to buy back his old majesty. In exchange, Coehorn would just have to follow a few instructions.

  Meinong had anticipated that Coehorn might need some persuasion. When a man depends on an allowance well into adulthood, as Coehorn had, and then at last gains his own estate, as Coehorn had, he often makes some solemn pledge to himself along the lines of ‘From now on I shall be my own master and I shall answer to nobody.’ But the 44-year-old Elias Coehorn Jr. barely let Meinong finish before he agreed to the lease of himself.

  After the payments began, the next stage was easy enough. Coehorn, for all his haughtiness, was really a submissive personality. At first, Meinong allowed Coehorn to show no more than tiny, automatic signs of deference to his benefactor when they interacted in public. But then, as if Coehorn were his partner in a waltz, Meinong began to make changes to the step, never tugging or prodding but only pulling away to let Coehorn bend a little further, fall a little further, so gradually that for a while even Coehorn himself didn’t notice that he’d started to behave quite differently towards Meinong … until there came a point when it was obvious to everybody at the camp that the German was leading the dance, even if they didn’t have any idea why that should be the case. As soon as Coehorn became conscious of what had happened, he rushed to correct it, and became ostentatiously rude to Meinong. But he didn’t fool anyone. Meinong was in charge now.

  This wasn’t at all what Trimble had intended eight months ago. Meinong was supposed to be a mere go-between in this arrangement, not an éminence grise in his own right. Well, bad luck for Trimble.

  Still, Meinong wasn’t enough of an egotist to insist that, once his power over the camp was established, it must also be recognised, so for the foreseeable future he would allow Coehorn to retain the formality of his position, to sprinkle that scrip around, to play the munificent lord, to buy back a hollow prestige with false tokens of an imaginary currency, to undermine the only thing he’d ever put his name on that was of any use to anyone. But these dejected people yearned to take orders from a man they respected so that once again they could respect themselves. And it was to Meinong’s advantage that he was an outsider, since they could see he was not infected by their madness. In the long run, they would turn willingly to him.

  Except my 9mm round had just cut the long run short, because he now had to ensure it didn’t puncture his accomplishments like it had punctured his body. Also, deeper in him, underneath these calculations, the shock he felt in the immediate aftermath was already giving way to fury, and this fury demanded flesh on its altar. There was no option but to act.

  ‘Help me up!’ he gurgled. Many of the onlookers were off chasing me, but the others encircled him where he lay.

  ‘You’d better not move, Mr Meinong,’ said Mac Parke, Coehorn’s former athletics trainer, who kneeled over him, trying to help. The shifts in power at the camp over the years had occasioned many proofs of Parke’s primary virtue: an ardent, selfless and lifelong fidelity towards more or less any man-shaped object that happened to be occupying his visual field at that particular time.

  ‘I tell you to help me to my feet.’

  ‘You’re bleeding pretty bad …’

  ‘Staunch it, then!’

  His vision spangling at the edges, Meinong was lifted up to lean against Parke while a second-generation girl pressed wads of kapok fluff against his wounds. To his astonishment, he could make out the American pilot – that was how he thought of me because he didn’t know my name – ascending the side of the temple on the rope-suspended platform. That confirmed his resolve. If I somehow survived long enough to announce that everything Meinong had told these Americans about the world war was a self-serving lie and that Meinong was very possibly a ‘war criminal’ (that oxymoronic modern notion), it would be all the more important that by that point Meinong had already reinforced his position. He wasn’t sure yet what kind of camp he would run, given the chance. Back in Germany, he had found the Third Reich’s obsession with control to be rather dreary and airless in practice. However, a young man staying for a week at a grand old mansion with a troop of snooty butlers may think to himself, ‘This is absurd, I would never want to be master of such a house,’ but later on in life, if he finds he actually has the opportunity …

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ That was Coehorn, approaching in his embroidered sisal dressing gown.

  ‘The ashu …’ Meinong had to try once more to form the word intelligibly. ‘The assassin is still on the loose. Kindly escort Mr Coehorn to hish cabin and keep him there.’ When he swallowed he could feel tooth fragments lodged under his tongue. A wave of nausea rose through him, but he kept his head up. What he felt from his wounds was not so much pain as a sort of panic of the flesh. The pain would come soon, he knew.

  ‘No, I’m out of bed now, I may as well stay and watch,’ said Coehorn. ‘Why are you talking like that? What happened to your face?’

  ‘Mr Coehorn, we all know that your own comfort and shuf … safety is of no concern to you when the welfare of your community is at stake.’ Meinong puffed a jet of blood from his open mouth. ‘But I’m afraid we cannot allow you to put yourself in harm’sh way. You are too important.’


  ‘Don’t be absurd, Meinong. I’ll go where I like.’

  Here, ahead of schedule, was the first test. True power operated on a primordial and wordless level. It was on this level that Coehorn had been superceded, and on this level that these people all knew it. Would they nevertheless rally around this preening failure, just because he was still technically in command?

  Once again Meinong gave the order, in the most unchallengeable tone he could manage. ‘Take Mr Coehorn to his cabin. And keep him there.’

  The order was obeyed.

  *

  I spent the first half of 1957 in Trujillo, mold gardening.

  (This is Zonulet again, by the way. Even if I wanted to respond to Vansaska’s unauthorised marginalia, I couldn’t, her handwriting being so indecipherable that it might as well be in code.)

  I didn’t give a roasted rat’s ass any more about the Branch 9 training camp, because I understood now that the fungus was a thousand times more important. It was going to transform the whole field of intelligence and probably win the Cold War. Before that, however, it was going to pay some dividends for McKellar and me. I had no intention of taking the fungus to my superiors at the agency, because I knew they’d try to steal it from me. Instead, McKellar and I would use it to win a series of victories that would make our ascension to Director and Deputy Director rapid and unopposable. Except, lately, I was starting to wonder whether that wasn’t a little unimaginative, whether in fact it wouldn’t be better to use the fungus to start a kind of entrepreneurial breakaway organisation of our own, still protecting the interests of the United States from within the executive branch but unoppressed by the old bureaucracy.

  After I woke up in Wilson’s sickbed, I found myself bloated with knowledge. I couldn’t remember how I’d got from the temple to San Esteban, but I could remember a fantastic quantity of other things that had little or nothing to do with me, running from the night Elias Coehorn Jr. was marched out of the octopus-wrestling match in 1938, through the first eighteen years of the two camps, right up to the present day – not just scenes and conversations and documents but even the thoughts of the people involved, often with a great deal more clarity than I remembered my own rum-sodden life. The whole strange story of the American settlements at the temple – not the strangest I’d heard in my fourteen years in the intelligence services, but certainly stranger than most – was available to me, like a surveillance dossier the size of the Library of Congress. The fungus, when I inhaled its spores inside that stone duct, had brought me to the aleph, the point from which all other points are visible. Each lie that Trimble had told me was now amended with the full truth. No, I didn’t have recollective access to every individual for every minute of every day – the clairvoyance was partial, according to principles I hadn’t yet discerned – but I had nearly everything of consequence.