by Ned Beauman
Consequence, relatively speaking. The campers and their follies didn’t actually matter to me, except in the sense that they had brought me to this apotheosis. But if you could turn the fungal snooperscope upon the agitators in Cuba, or upon the Kremlin, or upon the Branch 9 offices in Foggy Bottom, and obtain the same haul of detail, that would be something. Tradecraft as we knew it would be mostly obsolete. Sometimes I couldn’t help imagining what would happen if, for instance, the Stasi got hold of this stuff: gigantic underground typing pools full of agents huffing the spores out of respirator masks like addicts in an opium den, everything recorded, everything cross-referenced. But that vision didn’t worry me too much, because once my allies and I put the argyrophage to use it would only be a matter of time before all of the Eastern Bloc intelligence services gave up out of sheer despair.
The only trouble was, before that could happen, I had to work out how to farm the fucking thing.
Since I couldn’t risk sending a sample to Fort Detrick for analysis, I’d settled for examining the mold under a microscope, which was enough to satisfy me that it bore at least a basic resemblance to the canonical Deuteromycota illustrated in the textbooks I had obtained on laboratory microbiology. From a logistical perspective it would have been easier to run my subsequent experiments in the United States, but since I wanted an authentic Honduran climate, I rented a barn on the outskirts of Trujillo. To approximate the terroir of the temple, I arranged for the delivery of two hundred tons of limestone bricks, five hundred pounds of silver tableware, and three hundred pounds of animal bones. (Languishing on a shelf in a conference room in the American embassy in Havana, there was a Zhou Dynasty ritual bronze that Herbert G. Squiers, the diplomat and sinophile, had brought with him from Peking after he was appointed Minister to Cuba in 1902. Ever since I had learned its provenance I had thought of it as my emergency fund. Discreetly I removed the bronze from the embassy and sold it through an antiquities dealer in New York in order to pay the expenses that my operating budget from the agency couldn’t cover.)
With the help of Pavo and four other hired hands, I constructed a limestone passage, littered with silver and bone. Then, as a starter colony, I planted the stub of moldy armor I’d brought back with me. According to the textbooks, all fungi needed sources of carbon and nitrogen, but given that the temple didn’t even offer the guano or dead wood that might nourish a cave toadstool, I figured there had to be some loopholes in that statute.
And yet this fungus that needed so little nevertheless seemed to need something I wasn’t giving it. Weeks passed and it just refused to spread. Every day I put on a surgical mask and crawled into the passage to look for progress, but I never found a solitary hypha outcurled, even after I tried out four different configurations of the simulated temple, even after I resorted to artificial measures, glazing the silver with Czapek solution and dispersing the spores with a damp ponyhair brush. I recalled my widowed aunt in her basement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, battling obsessively against the black mold in her walls, killed in the end not by the ‘bad air’, as she always feared, but by an incendiary malfunction of the ‘anti-mold heater’ she bought from a catalogue. What would she have thought of me, primping, coaxing, begging on my knees? Meanwhile, in Cuba, Batista’s furious efforts to burn El Movimiento out of the hills were making about as much progress as my aunt ever did against her own insurgency, but I was gracing the Havana station with only token appearances.
One tyrannously humid day in July, I saw the date on my newspaper and it struck me that I had now spent almost six months with the fungus, longer than the whole airship operation had lasted, with nothing whatsoever to show for it. Ever since San Esteban, passing time seemed to be my main activity. Of course, what had changed was that I now understood, viscerally, how it felt to measure out eighteen pointless years in gallons of neck sweat. And I had not revised the judgment I made when I first set eyes on the settlers at the temple, which was that their heroic psychosis deserved more respect than any milksop sanity.
Bravo to them. But would I have endured it myself? Christ, no. Did their example mollify my extreme disinclination to spend even a single minute longer in stasis than I absolutely had to? Christ, no.
I refused to waste any more time. If I couldn’t cultivate the fungus myself, I would have to harvest it from the source. I would have to go back to the temple.
But I hadn’t made a very congenial impression on my previous visit there. And I wasn’t willing to stake everything on a negotation with Coehorn or Whelt or Burlingame. Somebody like Trimble could be relied upon to pursue his self-interest at least semi-rationally, but not those cultists.
I would have to take that festering silver armor by force.
Which meant armed men, enough to hold off dozens of people at gunpoint so I could remove it without hindrance. That was a far more drastic measure than I wanted to take – I was not a desperado like ‘Jawbone’ Atwater – but there was simply no alternative. The fungus trumped everything. However, I couldn’t just hand out rifles to Pavo and his friends. Not only would the stick-up be uncomfortably close to Branch 9 turf, but the get-away would involve transporting several hundred pounds of silver through at least fifty miles of jungle. The operation had to be efficient and well-resourced if I wasn’t going to risk a jumblefuck worse than my airship crash. Unfortunately, I’d already spent my Zhou Dynasty cauldron windfall, so the looting of one relic couldn’t underwrite the looting of several more.
I needed investment. And I would have to go to New York to get it.
*
‘Do you know what the old crowd is saying about you? They’re saying you must have gone loco, absolutely loco, if you’ve stayed out here all this time where no white man ought to live. For pity’s sakes, old pal, you’ve had your fun. Why don’t you just come home?’
(Coutts’s sister’s fiancé to Coutts, from the original shooting script of Hearts in Darkness)
*
If the first half of the American occupation of the temple involved a general refusal to acknowledge the passage of time, as if those eight years were just a week stretched out very thin, the second half was the rupture, when time broke upon the two camps.
The occupiers got so old they couldn’t ignore it any more. By 1957, even the most junior member of the original expeditions – Eastern Aggregate kitchen boy Merv Chavin, who had arrived as a teenager – was thirty-five and almost bald. And the most senior, Kingdom Pictures carpenter Dick Schwalbe, who even in 1938 had been anticipating his retirement, had actually managed to die of old age. He was the only one so far to have won that distinction. But he was far from the only one to have died. Because the jungle, which for so long had been merciful, seemed to have exhausted its patience.
There were singularities. One man shot himself through the eye socket while adjusting his bow and arrow. One man got so drunk on moonshine he drowned in a two-inch puddle. One woman slipped on the second-to-bottom step of the temple during a rainstorm and broke her neck. One man was knocked over by a galloping tapir and a broken tree branch impaled him through the rectum. One girl was bitten on the elbow by her pet porcupine and died of the infection.
Other causes were more routine. Disease, foremost. The language of medicine here was ‘sick’, ‘hot’, ‘thirsty’, ‘rotten’ and so forth, nothing as scholastic as ‘dysentery’ or even ‘fever’, because words like that implied associations of symptoms, semi-regular, semi-inferable, when on the contrary each failing body seemed to ring up its catastrophes like a slot machine. Common enough, also, were complications of childbirth and complications of surgery, the stings of scorpions and the fangs of jaguars.
But the stock was replenished. During those first eight years, there had been fewer than a dozen births. Some women found they stopped ovulating when there wasn’t enough to eat. For the rest, the withdrawal method was so prevalent at the temple that Irma once remarked, to general agreement, ‘If I get jism on my tummy one more goddamn time my poor cervix is going to
feel like it has no choice but to set up camp out there.’ After all, nobody wanted to come home storked from an overseas job.
Upon Trimble’s exile, however, the atmosphere of liberation was so intoxicating that several children were conceived that same night. And from then on a new impatience was felt among the common-law husbands and wives of the two camps, with the result that, starting around 1947, Coehorn was often heard to complain that any previous hardships they might have endured were as nothing compared to the interminable screaming of what sounded like ten thousand babies.
Where the first generation had never been more than grudging halfway adapters, the second was a genuinely new tribe, with Colby Droulhiole as its founder. They spoke in American accents and they had all been taught a sort of eschatology in which they would one day return with their parents to Hollywood or New York. But they belonged to the rainforest and to the temple. And the geometry of the latter – its steps underfoot or its rise overhead, depending on where they grew up – was so primal to them that any talk of disassembly or reassembly struck them as abstract, almost paradoxical.
Yet if you talked to the older kids in the Kingdom Pictures camp, you would find they believed at least as devoutly as their parents that the movie must be made. Of course, they had never seen a movie, but they had all played make-believe and drawn pictures, and they knew that a grand analogue of these activities called Hearts in Darkness was the central imperative of human life. ‘Are we making the movie right now?’ children would sometimes ask, trying to understand. ‘No, not yet!’ their elders would reply. Not until everything was finally ready, and the actors and actresses could stand in front of the cameras to say their lines.
What threw these metaphysics into confusion, however, was that Mr Whelt, the director of Hearts in Darkness, seemed to have just the opposite answer.
Between 1946 and 1958, Whelt filmed about twelve hours a day, every day. He used the last working 35mm camera at the site, which was a lopsided cannibal jalopy fixed up with spare parts from all the other rusted cameras, and adapted with a harness so it could be hauled from place to place by its operator,which gave the impression, since you almost never saw them apart, that the camera was now a prosthetic extension of Whelt’s body, or that Whelt was an extension of the camera’s, or that they had hybridised into a sort of centaur on five spindly legs. At the end of each day his arm was so worn out from cranking that it couldn’t lift a fork to his mouth. Since he wasn’t using lights or microphones, the only support he required from the Hearts in Darkness crew involved the film stock, before and after it was cranked through the camera: mile after mile had to be cooked up from wood pulp, tapir cartilage, rock salt, ureal ammonia, and silver filings, while the exposed reels had to be transferred to labeled clay cannisters for storage.
With the autonomy of a newsreel stringer, Whelt roved around both camps, shooting whatever he came across, patient and seemingly indiscriminate. He never intervened in the scene, unless he felt that somebody was acting, which he absolutely didn’t want. No acting, no script, no props, no costumes. Just that vagrant man-camera drinking up the business of the day. And yet, if he was asked what he was shooting, he would say he was shooting Hearts in Darkness.
The first time Whelt went down to the New York camp to film was in 1946, two days after Trimble was ousted. The membrane between the two camps had never seemed so thin, and he was admitted with goodwill and curiosity. Only once Coehorn noticed him was he chased away. But he just kept coming back, day after day, to scrump with his lens from the margins of the settlement. In that period, when you looked at Coehorn, the first thing you thought about was how stridently he had come to Trimble’s defense on that historic day, so his authority was already beginning the slide that would accelerate later when the camp’s economy failed. His instructions were still followed, but each time he demanded that Whelt should be thrown out and his camera should be confiscated, it took a little longer before anyone actually put a gentle hand on the director’s shoulder. Soon, Whelt was being given at least an hour’s grace before he was made to leave, and the camera was never profaned. In the end, Coehorn gave up; the only proviso he could still maintain was that he should never have to encounter Whelt personally.
To the New Yorkers it felt pretty screwy that they had among them not just one of the enemy but the leader of the enemy, like a dream where somebody famous turns up in the most illogical context. But they knew that even the Angelenos were mystified about what Whelt was now trying to accomplish – and it did seem very much as if he wasn’t there in any recognised capacity, as if he wasn’t, in fact, the same man they remembered, but a newcomer, innocent of the old squabbles, no affiliation save his indefinable project – so they half-ignored him like a cat or a ghost.
Eleven years on, it felt perfectly normal. Which meant Whelt was in a fine position to observe the changes in the Eastern Aggregate camp after Meinong took power.
It wasn’t as if the German swept aside a bicameral legislature. The camp had always been an autocracy. But this new autocracy wasn’t Coehorn’s autocracy, which had been vague and capricious and self-absorbed, thus liberal by sheer neglect, not so much an iron fist in a velvet glove as an iron fist lost between the cushions of a velvet couch. Nor was it Trimble’s autocracy, which most of the time had been targeted and intimate and unannounced, a secret police force attached to no state, so that you could share a nightly gourd of pineapple beer with your best friend and never have any idea he was compromised, desperate, following orders, until one morning you saw that he’d betrayed you to the Pozkito Enquirer.
No, Meinong was staging an old-fashioned honest-to-goodness kit-and-caboodle dictatorship.
Whelt’s camera saw: squads of men performing army drills, climbing trees and throwing spears and wrestling in the mud.
Whelt’s camera saw: a mother regarding her toddler’s supper longingly after her own food ration was withheld because for the third time in a row she hadn’t met her foraging quota.
Whelt’s camera saw: Meinong giving a speech about the Angelenos to the assembled camp (minus Coehorn, who was still in indefinite protective custody).
Whelt’s camera saw: a woman abasing herself in tearful public apology after she admitted to spreading a malevolent untruth about how some of the Eastern Aggregate scrip in circulation looked different from some of the other scrip.
Whelt’s camera saw: a man being punished by caning after he was caught making love to another man’s wife out in the forest.
Whelt’s camera saw: three of Meinong’s lieutenants approaching, stern looks on their faces, closer and closer until their chests blacked out the shot.
*
On October 4th, 1957 I took an elevator to an upper floor of Eastern Aggregate’s Pine Street tower for a meeting about an expedition to the jungle, exactly as Elias Coehorn Jr. had nineteen years earlier. Nothing had changed, not even the wall-eyed elevator operator, whom I recognised from my fungal cinematograph though we’d never physically met. In the old days, an Eastern Aggregate executive desiring psychological dominance in a meeting with an outside party could instruct the receptionists in the lobby to show his guest to the ‘express elevator’, which looked just like the others but made such a rapid and jerky ascent that the guest would stumble out seasick. Naturally, the idea had originated with the company’s redoubtable founder. I asked the operator whether it was still in use. ‘No,’ he told me, a little surprised that I knew about it, ‘they got rid of that a few years back.’ That was to be expected. An entire company as an extension of the personality of its founder, who, ‘in ordering the whole,’ like Leibniz’s God, ‘has had regard to every part, so that it is a mirror of him’ – that old style was in decline or reform. Today, business was supposed to look more like the United Fruit Company: rationalised, modularised, with no faces to speak of, just a colony reproducing itself with gray flannel spores. With Elias Coehorn Sr. gone, Eastern Aggregate was adapting to the times.
Yet Phibbs, like the elevato
r operator, had held out. And Coehorn’s spirit would preside in this building for as long as Phibbs was still here – not only because of the echoic mannerisms with which the former Good Conduct Division agent paid tribute to his employer of so many years, but also because of a fundamental quality they had in common – the sense that his refinement was an exquisite polish on a very rough ore, that he was as comfortable as any brahmin in his starched cuffs but it would be no novelty or perturbation for him to find them stiffened instead with dried blood.
‘I’m certainly eager to find out the purpose of this latest visit, Mr Zonulet,’ he said when I was seated across from his thirty-acre desk and his secretary had closed the door behind her. It was almost a year and a half since I’d come to look at the scrip. ‘Is there some further assistance our company can provide the State Department?’
‘I’m going to be straight with you, Mr Phibbs. Nineteen years ago your boss sent his son to Honduras to bring back a temple. He never came back. You must know at least that much. You may know a lot more. After all, somebody made sure that word didn’t spread, and maybe that was your secret service here. But what counts is that the younger Elias is still in the jungle. And I don’t think you can afford to leave him there any longer.’