by Ned Beauman
This fantasy, for Elias Coehorn Jr., had long since taken on the definitive quality of recorded history. Which made it extremely vexing that almost the opposite was now taking place.
When Meinong’s enforcers brought Whelt into the protective-custody hut, he greeted Coehorn civilly and without emotion, as if they were just a couple of strangers in a train carriage, even though this was the first time the two of them had come face to face since 1938. Coehorn, by contrast, burst out that he would not share a hut with this criminal. But he was ignored by the enforcers, and as he heard the thunk of the door being barred on the other side, his anger at this new indignity led to a broader mental review of Whelt’s behavior over the last nineteen years – so that within five minutes he was regarding him with a gaze of such oxyacetylene heat it was astonishing that Whelt didn’t seem to notice it at all, and within ten minutes his fingers were curling and quivering with an urge to throttle and snap, and within fifteen minutes his rage had reached an intensity so high that he couldn’t have held himself back one heartbeat longer – if Whelt hadn’t spoken at exactly that moment.
‘I’d like to go back to filming,’ he said. ‘I expect you’d like to get out of here too. I think it might be easier if we cooperate.’
‘No!’ Coehorn roared. ‘I will not cooperate! I will not cooperate with you!’
‘You’ve been shut in here ten months. Have you tried to escape?’
‘Ten months? Don’t be absurd.’ Coehorn hadn’t been keeping count of the days – he was not a secretary – but he knew it couldn’t be anything under five or six years. Lately he had been pleased to recognise in himself the maturity and wisdom of a man about to enter his fifties.
‘It’s October, 1957,’ Whelt said. ‘That makes ten months. I don’t think Meinong’s ever planning to let you out. But if we cooperate then maybe between us we can get somewhere.’
‘Oh, there’s that word again! Cooperate! My God, how it sickens me to hear you say that. If you had been willing to cooperate all those years ago then none of this would ever have happened!’
‘Actually, Mr Coehorn, that’s wrong for two reasons. The first is that I was ready to cooperate back then if you would’ve just let us shoot the movie, but you wouldn’t wait two weeks so we could put the temple back toge—’
Coehorn hurled himself at Whelt.
After languishing for so long in the hut, Coehorn’s physique no longer showed much evidence of the impressive rigor and athleticism that had definitely characterised his entire life prior to this confinement. Which explained why he didn’t manage to seize Whelt, force him to the ground, and knock the impertinence out of him forever with a hail of precise blows. Instead, this became another fantasy that turned against him: he gave Whelt a single wild open-handed clip on the ear before he felt something yank inside his upper back and he toppled over howling.
Whelt helped Coehorn to his bed. They didn’t speak. Later, Meinong’s enforcers brought in two plates of food, and they both ate. They didn’t speak. The whole muggy night passed. They still didn’t speak.
But the curiosity was like an ulcer on Coehorn’s tongue, and at last, the next morning, he said, ‘What was the second reason?’
‘Huh?’
‘You said there were two reasons why we couldn’t have sorted things out sensibly back then. What was the other one, as you see it?’
‘I think even before you took the temple apart, it was too late,’ Whelt said. ‘I think even before either of us set foot in Honduras, it was too late. We were already in the temple’s gravity. The diagram works backward in time as well as forward.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ By dignifying Whelt with this conferral Coehorn felt as if he was treasoning himself. And yet it had occurred to him while he tried to fall asleep that Meinong might have jammed the two of them in here precisely in the hope that one of them would murder the other and afterwards he would be rid of them both without taking any blame. If that was the case, Coehorn was at least spiting his plans. More and more, he regretted letting the others bully Trimble out of the camp. His old adviser would certainly have warned him off before he indentured himself to Meinong for that dubious scrip.
His back still ached. Morning sunlight shone through the high window slits, casting subsident pale rectangles on the opposite wall. The longer Coehorn went without setting eyes on the jungle, the more it withdrew like dying grass from his reality. Sometimes he imagined the hut on a Park Avenue corner, or nestled in the grounds at Braeswood, and those old recollected surroundings seemed far more solid to him. But even then he couldn’t dream the temple out of existence. Always it was there in his visions, the behemoth wedge, in place of the Waldorf-Astoria or his father’s mansion.
‘Are you aware that in 1946 I went inside the temple and I met the Pozkito gods and I found out the truth from them?’ Whelt said.
‘If you’re asking me, did we receive the news that you went crazy? Yes, we did.’
‘You must also be aware that for the last eleven years I’ve been making a different kind of film. I’ve been trying to counteract the diagram.’
‘And who or what is the diagram?’
‘That’s just my own name for it.’ Whelt crouched down to draw on the dirt floor with his finger. ‘“In any successful story, the action must intensify in a series of five or six regular increments, reach its highest level before giving way to a thrilling interval of weightlessness or flight, and then return safely to the status quo.” I thought the Whelt Rule was a formula for making movies, and I thought I’d come up with it myself. But really it was just instructions for drawing the diagram. The Pozkito gods must have put it into me somehow.’
‘That’s a picture of the temple,’ Coehorn said.
‘No. It’s the diagram. The temple and the diagram look alike because the temple is the diagram built in stone.’ Whelt rubbed out the drawing and started another by tracing a single line.
‘This is the river.’
‘What river?’ Coehorn said.
‘Any river. Every river. Now, imagine a man starts traveling along the river. This is his path. He wants to get all the way to the source.’
‘What is he going to find there?’
‘He doesn’t know,’ Whelt said. ‘Maybe he thinks truth. Or paradise. Or oblivion. Or the missing half of himself. Whatever it is, he just knows he wants to find it. But before he can get there, the river claims him. There he is, falling into it.’
‘He dies?’
‘Maybe. But first he loses his mind.’
‘Like you,’ Coehorn said.
‘Like all of us. Surely you recognise the pattern. It doesn’t have to be a man and it doesn’t even have to be a river but this is how it goes. Later, another man hears about the first man. And right away he gets an irresistible urge. He has to set off next to the first man’s trail. Find out for himself what’s at the end of the river. He knows it’ll be tough but thinks he’ll get all the way there because he won’t let the same thing happen to him that happened to the other guy. He’ll stay further away from the river, because he’s not following in the other guy’s footsteps, he’s just writing the other guy’s story. His journey isn’t a journey, it’s “about” a journey. That gives him a margin of separation. So he thinks he’s safe.
‘But it doesn’t work. The river claims this second man even sooner than it claimed the first.
‘Then a third man hears about it. He decides to make a movie about the second man’s story about the first man’s expedition. So he’s two degrees of separation from the river. But the river claims him faster still.
‘A fourth man comes along,’ Whelt said. ‘Let’s say he’s writing a diary about the third man making a movie of the second man’s story about the first man’s expedition. Three degrees of separation. But the river will get him in hardly any time at all. Whatever’s at the source of the river, he’ll be lucky to get anywhere near it.
‘And then maybe a fifth man writes a novel about the
fourth man writing a diary about the third man making a movie of the second man’s story about the first man’s expedition. Maybe he doesn’t even leave his house to do it. But all the same he’s screwed from the very beginning. And so on. Do you understand?’
‘I wish you’d stop speaking figuratively.’
‘I have to speak figuratively because the diagram is a figure.’
‘You seem to be saying this kind of misfortune is inevitable.’
‘We made it inevitable when we built the diagram,’ Whelt said. ‘When you did, that is – when you took half of the temple away. Intact, the temple was just a palace for the gods. But when we gave it this new shape, we turned it into something else. A shape with power, like a sigil. Did you ever talk to Burlingame about the Pozkito cosmogony? The Pozkitos don’t believe the gods created the world, they only believe they designed the Platonic forms, or they calibrated the laws of physics, or they invented the rules of the game, or something along those lines. That’s what this is. The shape ripples out across the world. Backward in time and forward. It influences events, makes them more likely to bend into this pattern. That’s what the Pozkito gods wanted. That’s what we did for them. We all fell into the river here. We all went insane. We made the shape with our lives, and at the same time we made the shape with the temple. That was like a transmitter and a power supply for the diagram, and we stayed here all these years and kept broadcasting. Again and again, all over the world, people will feel compelled to set off down the river, and then other people will set off after those people, and so on, and when they lose their minds, as they all will, that’s like a sacrifice on the gods’ altar. There are probably incidences of this that, when we left, hadn’t happened, but now, because we’re here, it has become the case that they happened before we left … Some of it’s hard to explain. But you see now why we’ll never leave the temple. We’re closer to the diagram than anybody, so it holds us tighter than anybody. We can’t overcome it. We can’t make any other shape with ourselves. I thought I could weaken it if I made a new kind of movie. A movie that smashes the Whelt Rule to pieces. A movie that just is. With people who just are. No center, no subject. No beginning, no end. But I don’t think it’s been working.’
Coehorn raised an eyebrow. ‘Right. And I suppose you’re about to tell me that if we queer this “diagram” by – oh, I don’t know – reassembling the temple, we’ll all be magically liberated from our folly?’
‘Yes. And if we disassembled the rest of it, just the same. Either way, the temple wouldn’t be the right shape to make the diagram any longer. It would just be a pile of stone again. The broadcast would end, so to speak. But I know neither of those things will ever happen. My people wouldn’t allow the disassembly and your people wouldn’t allow the reassembly. We won’t come to our senses until the diagram is gone. And we can’t get rid of the diagram until we come to our senses. That’s the bind.’
Recent developments have at last proven the futility and misguidedness of Whelt’s position. Everyone now understands that Coehorn was right all along. Why? Because Whelt has turned out to be even more demented than everybody feared. Just look at his fingers, dirty from scrawling nonsense on the ground.
Coehorn might have found it agreeable to believe that. But too much of Whelt’s account felt plausible to him. He was thinking of that morning in 1938, in his father’s office, right after he’d watched the octopus try to drown the wrestler in the tank at the Bering Strait Railroad Association headquarters, when Phibbs had passed him the wooden model of the temple and it had broken in half in his hands. At the time he hadn’t realised it, but surely, yes, he was ‘already in the temple’s gravity’. The flimsy prop had the mass of a basalt star.
What, after all, was the alternative? That he had meekly obeyed his father’s order to come to Honduras. That he had invested himself in such arbitrary make-work. That he had, more or less voluntarily, set himself on the course which ended here, down in this humiliating ditch. That the octopus and the wrestler – a couple of freaks too stubborn to give up a meaningless clinch, before an audience too passive to intervene – wasn’t just the best analogy for the bloodshed that Meinong probably aimed to provoke between the two former leaders in this hut, but also for every pointless day of the last nineteen years.
There had to be a more favorable, less nauseating account of his behavior. And Trimble’s cabbalism wasn’t really so hard to believe. Of the grand interventions his father made in the world, almost all were invisible to almost everybody. And Eastern Aggregate’s most senior accountants had long since passed beyond human mathematics. He had grown up understanding that. So he could believe that in that same darkness other corporations might operate.
The two halves of the balsawood model spinning in his mind, he considered Whelt’s claim that the objective was not to win the temple, but to win against the temple. He looked at Whelt. ‘What if there was another way?’
*
When Meinong woke in the dark from a traceless dream, he found that his fingers had already closed tight around the handle of the machete. Someone was in the cabin with him. He wasn’t sure where but he had sensed it even in sleep: an impurity in the night. ‘Who’s there?’ he said.
‘It’s Trimble.’
Meinong held his breath, listening for the almost imperceptible screak of a bow and arrow held in tension. He heard nothing. The machete Meinong slept beside was the last remaining usable metal blade in the camp. If Trimble did have a bow but hadn’t yet drawn it, Meinong would have time to throw the machete before he loosed an arrow.
However, he didn’t know if Trimble’s benefactor had brought him any other weapons. Conceivably the American pilot might even have been irresponsible enough to entrust him with a gun.
‘I have a machete, Mr Trimble,’ he said. ‘You’d better not come any closer.’
At this stage, a man with a gun would most likely have alluded to that advantage. But Trimble said, ‘I didn’t come here to mix it up, Mr Meinong. You know that ain’t my modus o.’
‘Why did you come here?’ Now that Meinong’s eyes were resolving the darkness a little better, he could see that Trimble was leaning casually against the opposite wall of the cabin, both hands propped behind him.
‘We had a deal,’ Trimble said.
‘Yes. And that deal was premised on a supply of scrip. There has been no more scrip since the American pilot was shot down. So the deal is kaput.’ These days his diction was only faintly affected by the hole in his face that had never quite closed up.
‘You wouldn’t be running this place if it weren’t for me.’
‘That is true. I am of course grateful for your help.’
‘Gratitude’s a jingle in the hand, not a jingle in the mouth. That’s what Tommy Gagliano used to say.’
‘I am unfamiliar with the idiom. But you no longer have anything to offer me, Mr Trimble. So I consider our association concluded. I ask you to leave my quarters.’ With deliberate motions he pushed his sheet aside and swung his feet onto the ground.
‘But I do got something. I knew gratitude wouldn’t come into it so I made sure I got something you’ll just pop your cork for.’
‘And what is that?’
As best Meinong could follow, Trimble had some photographs of a woman called Emmeline Sapp, a former lover of Gracie Calix, who for more than twenty years had been immured in a mental asylum in Texas. The photographs gave evidence of electroshock treatments and abuse by the orderlies. Accompanying them was a letter from the director of the asylum stating that under certain conditions he would be willing to approve Miss Sapp’s discharge.
‘I assume the American pilot brought you these materials,’ Meinong said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Who was he, may I ask?’
‘Just an old pal of mine.’
‘Show these materials to Gracie Calix and put her in your power. Put Calix in your power and the ground beneath Burlingame falls away. That is your idea?’
‘Assuming they are real, what do you want in exchange?’
‘We’ll be partners again. But this time everybody knows about it. Tomorrow at noon you make an announcement. Throw me a welcome-home party. “Here’s my good buddy Trimble, come back to help me out. You better treat him nice or you’ll get it from me pretty hard.”’
Meinong smiled. ‘I’m afraid that is quite impossible.’
‘That’s my price and I’m the only one selling. Take it or leave it.’
‘Where are these photographs now?’
‘Oh, they’re stashed out in the jungle. But you’ll never find them. And even if I had the inclination I couldn’t tell you where to look. I know how to get there, sure, but it ain’t a case of “turn left at the kapok tree,” if you catch my drift.’
Once Meinong was on his feet, Trimble was only three long paces away. Very fast, Meinong moved across the cabin, grabbed him by the wrist, and pinned his left hand to the mud-pile wall. He swung the machete. The angle of the blade took off the top joint of Trimble’s index finger, two joints of each of the next two fingers, and nearly all of his little finger. With a soft drumroll, as if of impatience, the nubs fell to the ground.
Trimble didn’t make even the faintest sound, but he gave a slow buck of the head, mouth gaping, eyes bulging. Then he slid down the wall, part squat and part collapse, to grab for his severed fingers, frantically, as if he was afraid somebody else might get them first.
Meinong tore a strip of fabric from his bedsheet. When he tried to take Trimble’s injured hand, the other man flinched away. ‘Keep still, please,’ Meinong said. ‘I’m going to bandage you so you don’t bleed to death. You must hold the hand higher than your heart.’ He tied the bandage tight. As instructed, Trimble kept the hand up in the air, which made Meinong smile. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he replied. ‘Now you are going to take me to the extortion materials. If you do not, I will cut off the rest of your fingers. And after that your ears and nose and genitalia and so forth.’ Trimble looked at him, breathing hard, rageful but defeated, an expression to savor.