by Ned Beauman
We arrived around three in the morning. There had been no rain yet as we drove but it started with such abruptness and such profusion the instant I had one foot out of the truck that it was like that practical joke where somebody has balanced a pail of water on top of a door. As our driver Iván stretched out in the truck to sleep, we rushed across the street to Le Sphinx. Zonulet gave a bailiff’s knock.
After a short time the door was opened by a man in a dressing gown whom I took to be Wilson. He shook Zonulet’s hand with some emotion. ‘It’s marvelous to see you here and I’m not surprised in the least,’ he said. ‘Come inside.’
We followed him into the hall and I introduced myself. Outside the dogs were barking at the thunder. ‘What do you mean, you’re not surprised?’ Zonulet said.
‘My father used to say that in his day there was no such thing as a “business acquaintance”. If one had fair dealings with a fellow then one called him one’s friend. I can see you’re a man of my father’s school. Was it business that brought you together with Mr O’Donnell? Yes, and in passing at that. But has that prevented you from coming here to pay your respects at his funeral? No, it has not. I call that sockingly admirable. I’d like to make you an honorary Englishman, ha ha! No offense to your own country, of course, but—’
‘O’Donnell’s dead?’
‘You didn’t know? But I assumed that was why you were here.’
‘We came here to talk to him,’ Zonulet said.
‘So the question of the Irish inheritance still hasn’t been settled? Well, I dare say now it never will be. I’m bally sorry to tell you the fever made off with him this afternoon. I’ve already been up half the night comforting the ladies. It’s been a great blow to us all. You remember I used to call O’Donnell a pillar of our little community. So dependable, so forthcoming, always there just when you needed him …’
‘I want to see the body.’
‘We interred him right away, out of regard for hygiene, but we’ll be holding a proper service tomorrow.’
Zonulet grabbed Wilson by the shawl collar of his dressing gown. ‘There is no O’Donnell, is there? You’ve all been in on it this whole time! Tell me the truth or I swear to God I’ll knock your head off, you fucking limey pimp!’
‘I can assure you I bore the pall myself!’ Wilson protested. ‘So to speak.’
Zonulet let him go. ‘Where? Where is he buried?’
‘In the southerly graveyard.’
Zonulet went back out into the rain. ‘Sorry about …’ I said, tailing off into a hand gesture.
‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ Wilson said. ‘I know grief can positively knock a man for six. Do you suppose he’s off to lay a wreath on the grave?’
I supposed he was off to do a lot more than that.
I asked to borrow an umbrella. Returning with it, Wilson said, ‘You must remind me to show you our lending library later.’
When I got to the truck Zonulet was already haggling with Iván about an overtime bonus. I followed them to the graveyard. Along with two hurricane lamps they carried the two shovels Iván kept in the truck for rockslides on the road. Cacti grew admidst the graves. At first I told myself I would watch them dig, since if I was to be complicit in the defilement of a fresh grave some obscure principle of moral integrity seemed to demand that I should at least invest myself fully in the enterprise. I stood there in the downpour hoping that lightning would strike neither my umbrella nor the shovels. It was a gothic scene. But after about a half-hour of digging they had made so little apparent progress that I asked Zonulet how long he thought it would take. He told me four or five hours. I did not want to get Wilson out of bed again so I went back to the truck and slept in the front seat.
Later – a few hours ago as I write – I was wakened by the sunrise. For the first time I saw San Esteban in daylight and for the first time it struck me with real force that I was at the threshold of the jungle, which for so many years had been to me as perhaps the afterlife is to others: I had kept the faith that this ineffable region would solve all mysteries, mend all voids, and yet so far I had rejected any offer of passage there. A few children were already out of doors, guinea pigs scurrying at their feet, and they stared at me as I found my way back to the graveyard. Iván was resting but Zonulet was still digging. When he looked up at me from the deep hole his eyes goggled brightly from a balaclava of mud. Zonulet claims that because of his liver he is not far from the afterlife himself, and yet seeing him then I could tell he would have gone down without fear into Hades and scattered the dead from his path to drag O’Donnell back up to the surface. Remember, we did not even know for certain that O’Donnell could have told us anything of use about REMOTER. But Zonulet’s heart was set. I had myself to blame for that.
‘We’re already close!’ Zonulet said. ‘I can feel it. The sepultureros did a rush job.’
He was right. About a dozen more turns of the shovel and it struck wood.
Iván got up and helped Zonulet scrape the rest of the soil from the lid of the coffin.
‘Open up, please, Mr O’Donnell!’ Zonulet shouted giddily. ‘Open up or we’ll have to break down the door!’
Together, they pried off the lid with their shovels.
The coffin was empty.
* * *
About the cruelty and injustice that the New Yorkers were now suffering under Meinong’s rule, Burlingame felt sadness: deep, genuine, abiding sadness. Any decent person would have. But about Meinong himself, Burlingame felt sadness too, and this sadness was not so much humanitarian as professional or aesthetic: it was the sense that Meinong had debased his own abilities. She had met the German several times before his elevation and she had found him well-mannered, intelligent, humorous, cultured. And now he was conducting his dictatorship like a much stupider person.
For the last eleven years – ever since Whelt’s abdication – she had run the Kingdom Pictures camp, and she had run it pretty well. She worked hard. But did she seek to observe every last thing that was going on? Did she seek to regulate every little sub-department of life? No, of course not. Perhaps her old self, a prig and a swot and a virgin, would have assumed that such a tight nervous grip was necessary for control. Today she knew better.
Her education in power could not be separated from her education in sex. Sex in particular, not love. At best, her experience of love had given her some useful insight into the effects it had on other people. But love could not be used as an analogy or manual for anything else. It was only itself, untranslatable and incommensurate. Sex, on the other hand, had shone its light all around. From the day she was born until the day she met Gracie, she had felt unwelcome in the world. You weren’t invited; you quite obviously don’t belong here; if you must hang around, for goodness’ sake try not to get in the way. But all that had changed. Now she knew she wasn’t at the edge of the world, but rather at its center, or at least a few rosy inches from its center when she pressed herself against Gracie in bed. The world yielded to her touch now, disclosed every secret of its workings. Take; take all that you want; take more, actually, just in case your stomach is bigger than your eyes. From those dissolving hours came the strength and the serenity that made her such a good chieftain. She wasn’t feared (except by some of the children) but she was respected, even revered at times, and everything she wanted done – everything that mattered – was done. Whereas Meinong seemed to think you had to be clenched and rigid at all times. How like a man. Labored and tedious, unironic and unerotic: that was his idea of power. His transformation had been the reverse of her own.
So her people had food, shelter, clothing (all of which had found their own styles over the years, distinct on each side; the Hollywood camp was regarded as the more modernist of the two). They had box traps and shaving horses, puppet theaters and chess sets, crutches and dentures. They had as much comfort and security as could possibly be expected on these island steps. And yet there was still one respect in which she sometimes felt she was failing them.
‘You know next year it will be twenty years?’ Burlingame said.
She lay there with Gracie’s head on her chest. Their bed had no springs, of course, but their mattress, woven from sisal leaf and packed with kapok fluff, was cushiony enough. Outside the cabin, the camp went about the business of the afternoon. More and more often lately she’d found herself coming back here with Gracie to make love after lunch, as if the season had blown in some aphrodisiac pollen from the jungle. From here, when she raised her own head an inch, she had an interesting angle on Gracie’s nose. This nose was Burlingame’s heathen idol, the fetish of her cult. It was a horrendous shape – on any other face, it would have been grotesquely bulbous – and yet somehow in this particular context it didn’t just leave Gracie’s good looks undiminished, but in fact was the capstone of the entire set-up, uniting all her features into a perfect whole. You didn’t have to be in love with Gracie to think so. Burlingame was certain that, if they had lived to see it, Aristotle and da Vinci would have gone to their graves obsessed with the mystery of how this nose could be so beautiful.
‘Twenty years,’ Gracie said. ‘We better start planning the anniversary ball.’
Burlingame smiled. ‘That’s not what I meant. I thought of it just now and it reminded me of something Apinews said a long time ago. This was when we’d been here about a year, I think, which already seemed rather absurd. Someone, I don’t remember who, said, “Do you think you’ll ever, ever get used to these mosquitoes?” And he said, “Oh, sure—”’
‘Please don’t try to do an accent,’ Gracie said.
Burlingame gave her a flick on the ear. ‘He said, “Oh, sure. No problem. I’ll get used to them eventually. Just give me about twenty years.” And we all had a great laugh about that, of course. The thought of still being out here in twenty years. But it isn’t a joke any longer. Twenty years. The shooting schedule was two weeks.’
‘If the movie had finished up in two weeks, we never would’ve met.’ Gracie squeezed her hand.
‘I know that.’
‘And even say we had, someplace else, we would have had to hide.’
Although Burlingame had never met Gracie’s first lover, she felt that the tragedy of Emmeline in the Texas madhouse had become a part of her own history. So she was proud that she had led by example here: seeing their new boss canoodling quite openly with another woman had helped the Hollywood settlers towards an outlook that was tolerant even by the standards of that town. Today, no high position was required to immunise you from reproof over your living arrangements: there was, for instance, Floyd Noisom and Wally Charters (Burlingame found them a charming couple); Emil Berg, Vinton Miehle and Janet Jones (Burlingame anticipated hurt feelings in the long run but didn’t see anything wrong with the venture in the meantime); even Wayne Dutch and his raccoon ‘Mrs Dutch’ (frankly Burlingame did feel this was beyond the pale but let he who is without sin, etc.) ‘For my own part I don’t regret a thing,’ she said. ‘But not everyone here has been as happy as we have. There are some people who might have been better off at home.’
‘Well, maybe they ought to go home, then.’
‘But you know no one here would ever think of leaving. Not unless someone told them to. And the only person who could tell them to, and then expect to see it happen—’
‘—is you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to?’ Gracie said. ‘Tell everybody to run off home to Hollywood?’
‘I sometimes wonder if I should.’
‘But we’re still making the movie. Every man, woman, and child here, even the littlest, they all want to see the movie finished come hell or highwater. We didn’t put in twenty years just to give up now.’
Burlingame did not dispute that. Never had she permitted an interruption to the steady manufacture of nitrate film – no matter that Whelt and his camera gorged themselves on such quantities that it was a continual burden on the camp, no matter that when asked he would elucidate his scriptless enterprise in only the most gnostic terms. She hadn’t come to the jungle to make Hearts in Darkness, but everyone else in this camp had. If there is one thing that’s forbidden even to an empress, she thought, it is to question the very existence of the empire. Though she might very well have doubts, it wasn’t her place to lead a sort of civic suicide.
Nevertheless, she did wonder: how was it possible that nobody had ever deserted either of the camps in the nineteen years they’d been here? Loyalty and steadfastness were excellent virtues but in this case couldn’t they be regarded as a form of insanity? Some of these people had left families behind. If she ever did get back to Cambridge, with such a paltry amount of serious anthropological or archaeological work in hand, it would almost certainly jeopardise the chances of other undergraduates getting permission from the faculty to take trips like this in the future.
But Gracie was right. The film did have to be finished.
Gracie shifted atop her, probably just to ease her limbs, but something in the friction made Burlingame’s breath catch. Her hand slid down towards Gracie’s hip bone. They made eye contact for a moment, and then Gracie started kissing around her nipple. Burlingame sighed happily.
There was a knock at the door of the cabin.
‘Not now, please!’ Burlingame called out.
Rick Halloran’s voice: ‘I really am sorry to disturb you, Miss Burlingame, but it’s important.’
Gracie was now kissing her way down Burlingame’s stomach, saunteringly, touristically, as if she had no particular object in mind but was curious to find out what might lie in this direction. ‘How important?’ Burlingame said. Did she seek to regulate every little sub-department of life? Less than ever.
‘Meinong’s guys have taken Mr Whelt.’
In thirty seconds Burlingame was up, dressed, and conferring with Halloran outside the cabin. ‘What do you mean “taken”?’
‘You know that they’ve been keeping Coehorn locked up “for his own protection”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, now they’ve slung Whelt in there with him. He was down in the other camp shooting as usual, then three of Meinong’s guys took his camera and hustled him off.’
‘Had he done anything to provoke them?’
‘We don’t know.’
Whelt’s mere presence in the Eastern Aggregate camp might once have been regarded as a provocation. As the years passed it had become routine. But Burlingame could well believe that, now Meinong was in charge, he might contrive fresh umbrage. And, yes, if he felt like it, he would have been entirely within his rights to turf Whelt out of the camp. This, though, was quite different.
‘Rick, I’d like you to go down there. Find out if they have some sort of grievance or if this is just a kidnapping. Make it clear we won’t stand for it. And by all means carry a weapon. Not obtrusively. But visibly.’
Burlingame would have liked to go herself, but it would give the wrong impression to Meinong if he could bring her scurrying down the steps every time he transgressed. So instead she waited, anxious.
By the time Halloran returned, the news had spread through the camp, and he had a large audience for his report. ‘They say he’s under arrest.’
‘On what grounds?’ The last time the New Yorkers had ‘arrested’ anyone was in 1942, after they caught the two men Whelt sent to steal ammonia from their ice-making machine.
‘They say he’s been trespassing. They say he’s been asked to leave, but he’s carried on shooting, which he hasn’t any right to do. They say they suspect him of spying.’
‘On what?’
‘Private conversations. Manufacturing techniques.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Burlingame said. ‘In other words, he’s done absolutely nothing wrong.’
‘He’s going to be put on trial.’
‘I see. What’s their price?’
‘I asked them that and they pretended to be offended.’
Most likely, Meinong thought a coup de main would
impress his little populace, unite them behind him once relations between the two camps turned to feud; and if that got out of hand, so much the better for him. Most likely, he thought he would have the advantage in any confrontation. Burlingame had seen his soldiers drilling. Of course, Meinong was an ex-soldier himself, and she didn’t like to resort to stereotypes but the Germans had started one war this century already. He hadn’t even been here from the beginning, and he thought he had the right to spoil years of peace.
‘What now?’ said Gracie.
‘We shall give them one night to come to their senses. Then, tomorrow, if they haven’t let him go, we shall go down there in force and fetch him ourselves.’ She was aware of the gravity of the order. Not once in two decades had the long squabble over the temple actually broken out into violence. And perhaps she was playing into Meinong’s hands. But he had Whelt. This was not a time to quail. ‘We don’t want a fight,’ she said – even though (she was surprised to realise this) the thought of leading a charge did hold some appeal, as a sort of culmination … A vision passed through her mind of Gracie unstrapping her battered armor and dressing her wounds, like Achilles beside Patroclus … Nevertheless, she repeated, ‘We don’t want a fight. But if they must have one then we shall supply it.’
*
Recent developments have at last proven the futility and misguidedness of Whelt’s position. Everyone now understands that Coehorn was right all along. Even Whelt himself can’t deny the facts. But the man-boy will not give up gracefully. Instead, in his humiliation, he lashes out, snarling, spitting, animalistic – putrid breath – also hunch-backed, come to think of it – maybe even facially disfigured, for some reason? Coehorn, on the other hand, stands calm and statesmanlike, declining to gloat or to punish.