Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  Meinong draped his bedsheet over Trimble’s head in case they met anybody on their way through the camp; none of his subordinates would have the temerity to ask who was in the ghost costume.

  With a hand on Trimble’s upper arm he guided him to the edge of the forest. Then he pulled off the bedsheet and poked him in the small of the back with the tip of the machete. ‘I will walk behind you. If you try to run I will cut you down.’

  ‘It’s dark. Can’t we wait till morning?’

  ‘No delays. You’ve lived out in the jungle for eleven years. You can find your way.’ But Trimble had only taken a few steps forward when a precaution occurred to Meinong. ‘Wait.’ He gathered three sticks from the ground, tore three long leaves from a palm, stripped the leaves down to their midribs, and used the midribs to lash a stick to each of Trimble’s feet and the third to his head. The point was to make him as clumsy as possible. Meinong was going to have to follow wherever Trimble led, even though he didn’t know what sort of infrastructure Trimble might have in place out there. He recalled the case of a clever Armia Krajowa girl who managed to walk an Untersturmführer right into the tripwire of a spring-gun during a raid on a safehouse. So these prosthetic augmentations to Trimble’s height and shoe size would make it difficult for the American to duck under or step over any of his own traps.

  ‘I can’t walk with these on,’ Trimble complained.

  ‘Yes, you can. Proceed, please.’

  ‘I’m still bleeding.’

  ‘I wish to remind you that when your “old pal” shot me in the face I did not scream for my nursemaid.’

  Like two brave boys in a fairytale they trekked through the dark woods, except that this jungle had to be regarded as a crazed and degenerate mutation of the Grimms’ noble Deutscher Wald, suitable for the disposal of only the most low-grade characters in the most low-grade stories. Meinong did his best to keep his bearings so that he could find his way back to the temple alone if he killed Trimble.

  ‘What did your “old pal” tell you of the current world situation?’ Meinong asked.

  ‘He told me the Yankees won the World Series five years in a row.’

  After that they didn’t speak for a while. At their slow pace it was most of an hour before Trimble stopped, although they had reached no perceptible landmark, and said, ‘All right, we’re here.’

  ‘I see nothing.’

  ‘I buried the pictures in front of this tree. You can’t tell in the dark but the tree looks like Marie Dressler. That’s why I picked it.’

  Feeling around with his foot, Meinong found there was indeed a bump in the earth. ‘Very well. Dig them up.’

  ‘But …’

  Meinong raised the machete. ‘Dig.’ Trimble’s shoulders slumped. He got down on his knees and started scraping the ground away with his intact hand. Meinong found it a pathetic sight, and, furthermore, maddeningly inefficient. ‘Stop that,’ he said. ‘Get up. Come over here.’ He made Trimble stand with his back against a trumpet tree, then reallocated a couple of the palm leaf midribs from his head to tie his wrists together behind its slim trunk.

  ‘This tree’s full of ants! I can already feel them!’

  After giving Trimble’s wrists a tug to make sure they were secure, Meinong went to look for a trowel. The jungle was a dank cellar beneath the early dawn, only a little light washing down through the grate of the canopy. Before long he came across a tree trunk on the ground, its insides mostly eaten away by termites. Pushing down with his heel, he snapped off a broad curve of thick bark, and a second for when the first one broke. When he got back, he found Trimble writhing against the trumpet tree, trying to rub the ants off himself just like a dog. Setting the machete aside, Meinong knelt down and began to delve for Trimble’s cache with a two-handed grip on his bark scoop.

  ‘How deep did you bury these items?’ he asked when his arms had begun to tire.

  ‘Pretty deep,’ Trimble said.

  ‘Was that necessary?’

  ‘Can’t take any chances out here.’

  Meinong detected a change in the feel of the soil. It had a mild endogenous warmth. He ran his fingers through it, puzzled. Actually, the soil wasn’t just warm, it was thrumming. Shifting. The soil was alive.

  The soil exploded.

  Meinong was knocked on his back by a geyser of spots and snarl. A claw opened his throat. Fangs ribboned his forehead. The jaguar pressed down on him, hot and ecstatic. It baked his face in its breath, drooled in his eyes, and in return the splash of his own carotid blood overpainted the beast’s own mottle.

  He tried to roll out from under it but it had him pinned down on the ground like foolscap on a blotter. Instead he stretched out his left arm, groping for the machete. He saw that where the exhumed jaguar’s eyes should have been there were only voids. As it gnashed a chunk out of his shoulder, his fingers closed tight around the machete’s handle.

  With the last strength he would ever have he hauled the machete in an arc overhead. It found meat and the jaguar squealed. For a few seconds it ran in place on him, small half-absented jerks of its feet as if it was asleep and dreaming of a chase. Then it slumped sideways, and the machete fell from Meinong’s hand. The whole struggle had taken only a few seconds.

  ‘You lucky bastard,’ Trimble said behind him. ‘That was a fluke, you know that? A real slop shot. She should’ve had you for breakfast. She was strong as a subway train, considering she wasn’t even fully grown. I found her maybe two years back when she was a baby. All alone in the forest. So I adopted her. I took her peepers out with a stick so she’d always rely on her loving foster daddy. Brought her up, fed her anything I didn’t like to eat myself. I knew one day she’d come in useful. Then about a day and a half ago, I knocked her on the head and I tied her up so she couldn’t eat. And right before I came to see you, I knocked her on the head again, untied her, buried her with her face in an armadillo’s nest so she’d have a little air but she couldn’t dig herself out. By the time you got here she must’ve been hungry. Hungry and a little exacerbated about the situation.’

  Meinong tried to respond but found he couldn’t speak. The dead jaguar, like a companiable housepet, still had its heavy tail draped over his thigh. As he lay there he felt no pain, just cold, and his well-intentioned heart was flushing more and more of his blood out of his body. The sensation was quite different from when he’d gargled that bullet: this was no emergency, there were no further measures to be taken. He wondered whether Trimble had ever really had those photographs of Emmeline Sapp in his possession; probably not.

  ‘Now I just have to get free. Shouldn’t take too long. Then, if you don’t mind too much, I’ll saw off your head and I’ll take it back to camp and I’ll …’

  But then Trimble tailed off as three figures materialised soundlessly out of the trees.

  To Meinong they looked just like the men who had shot dead the Erlösungfeld farmers during his pursuit through the jungle eleven years ago: Indians in khaki field trousers carrying bolt-action rifles. One of them had a crude sailorly tattoo on his bicep, showing off pouty lips and naked breasts and a pert bottom, except these parts did not belong to a human female but rather to some sort of anthropomorphic banana dressed in ruffled sleeves and an oversized bowl-like hat. ‘Good morning, fellas!’ Trimble said, his voice not so confident now. ‘I can guess what you’re wondering, and it’s a doozy of a story.’ Two of the soldiers moved past Meinong, out of his diminishing field of vision, while the fruit-wench Indian kept his rifle trained on Trimble. There was some activity around the trumpet tree. ‘Thanks a million, my arms were sore as hell, and these ants!’ Trimble said. ‘Listen, fellas, I think my bandage needs changing, so how about we – hey, fellas – now, if you’ll just – hey – hey!’ And the last thing Meinong heard before his consciousness trickled away forever was Trimble shouting as the three men dragged him off through the forest.

  *

  ‘We were hoping to rescue you both from Herr Meinong,’ Burlingame said, ‘b
ut I’m not sure that we can if he isn’t here.’

  When Whelt and Coehorn emerged from the protective-custody hut, they found Burlingame’s army milling around in a state of mild frustration and embarrassment. This morning around twenty of the Angelenos had armed themselves with bows and spears, hurrayed at a tremendously rousing St Crispin’s Day-type speech from Burlingame, and marched down to the New York camp to liberate the prisoners by force. But now there was nothing for them to do, and they were conscious of people staring.

  ‘Well, it’s very nice of you to go to the trouble all the same,’ said Coehorn in a rare access of good manners, the feud between the camps forgotten for the time being.

  The suggestion that Meinong might have fled in terror at the Angelenos’ approach had been tested for seaworthiness and regretfully discarded as untenable. As far as anyone could tell, he was simply truant. Of course, there were still plenty of men and women here who took orders from Meinong, but his unexplained absence must have interrupted the trance of their flunkeyism: as recently as last night it had seemed pivotal that Whelt and Coehorn should remain locked up, but today they found themselves unable to articulate the reasons why. As usual, Mac Parke could be everlastingly loyal to something only so long as it was dangled in front of his face. Having met so little resistance, the disappointed Angelenos asked one another: are we absolutely sure there isn’t anything here that we can rescue from anyone?

  But now more and more New Yorkers were mixing into the crowd in front of the protective-custody hut, and when Whelt noticed how they were looking at Burlingame, he realised that even if her war party had found itself redundant in one area, it had accomplished something quite unprecedented in another: barring a stupendous reassertion by Meinong, from this day forward the Englishwoman might have open to her the leadership of both of the camps at the temple.

  ‘I almost feel I should apologise that we didn’t come sooner,’ Burlingame told Coehorn. ‘I know you’ve been in there for a terribly long time.’

  ‘I certainly have. I felt every moment of the last seven years of captivity.’

  ‘Seven years?’ Burlingame began. ‘But it was only—’ and then, apparently thinking better of it, shut her mouth.

  ‘I hope you recognise this as a historic occasion. Indeed, I can’t help wishing our old friend Trimble were here with his reporter’s notebook so he could immortalise in rough-hewn tabloid prose …’ But when Coehorn saw Burlingame’s expression it was his turn to tail off. ‘Anyway, the point is, Whelt and I have made an agreement about what to do with the temple.

  ‘An agreement?’ said Burlingame, astonished.

  ‘Yes. We’ve come to a perfect understanding. Perhaps he’d better be the one to explain – he knows all the technical details.’

  In fact, the understanding was not quite perfect, because Whelt had kept one thing back from Coehorn. Eleven years ago, the gods inside the temple had, as a mere footnote, explained that Whelt was really Elias Coehorn Sr.’s son and that Elias Coehorn Jr. was really Arnold Spindler’s son. Whelt had chosen not to reveal this to his stepbrother (a long and oblique ‘step’, but he could think of no better word for the relation) because he feared the resultant emotional complications might prevent Coehorn from thinking calmly. Now, however, as the sun rose over what might be his last day as the director of Hearts in Darkness, he thought back to his very first. The mansion in Bel Air, dark and spooky and mazed from floor to ceiling with tatters of airship canvas, had been nothing more than a sound stage; its occupant, melifluous and reeking and alop in the face, nothing more than an actor; the whole production mounted by Elias Coehorn Sr. to obliterate the reputation of a dead man while simultaneously preserving his occasional usefulness as an undead puppet. Or at least that was part of it; but it also seemed possible that, even as early as 1929, he might have dreamed of river-damp in his vicuña-wool socks – that, unconsciously, he might have felt the temple’s pull, might have seen madness in his future (because nobody was immune), and might have decided to expurge that madness from himself, to dump it somewhere far away like a few tons of coal spoil from one of Eastern Aggregate’s mines, to use the false Spindler as a sin-eater or Gadarene swine absorbing the madness on his behalf.

  If so, Whelt’s father had shown a far-sightedness that Whelt himself hadn’t matched. He had spent most of his first three decades compiling axioms for life, axioms that were supposed to be rational and self-sufficient, but he now believed that if you examined those schematics with a magnifying glass you would find nothing but the diagram, repeated over and over again in different transpositions. And later, with his scriptless film, he had attempted to break free, but wasn’t the anarchy of that project just as reverent an offering to the temple as his original master-plan? He had never told the story; the story had always told him. And he knew he still hadn’t escaped it because when he thought about what movie he wanted to make next, the idea that always came to him first was a movie about the shooting of a movie, not necessarily in the jungle but maybe in the salt flats or at the bottom of the ocean … Until the diagram was neutralised he couldn’t know what movie he might want to make once free of its influence.

  ‘We ought to talk about it in private,’ Whelt said. The three of them went back inside the protective-custody hut, despite Coehorn briefly insisting that he would sooner die than cross its threshold again.

  ‘… So we won’t come to our senses until the diagram is gone,’ Whelt concluded, after repeating to Burlingame the explanation he’d given to Coehorn. ‘And we can’t get rid of the diagram until we come to our senses. We’ll never agree to disassemble the temple or reassemble it in its original form. But there is a way to give it a new shape, and this was Mr Coehorn’s suggestion. Imagine the two halves of the temple; now, turn one half upside down, and slide it across so it fits over the top of the other half. The two sets of steps lock together just like a zipper. You have a square cuboid two hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide and four hundred feet long. That’s what we will construct.’ With a gesture to the open door of the hut he took in the felsenmeer of limestone that still defined the layout of the Eastern Aggregate camp, rocks on which the New Yorkers had run aground, the mess of their own unfinishing accommodated like geography. ‘Nobody gets what they want, meaning nobody has to let the other side win. The temple still can’t be shipped to New York and the movie still can’t be shot. Because of that, there shouldn’t be any objections. And when the temple is cubed, when it’s not in its current shape any more, the power of the diagram will be broken and we will no longer feel compelled to stay here. Until my discussion with Mr Coehorn it never would have occurred to me to venture anything so perverse. But I think it’s our only escape. And I think you’re the only one who could persuade everybody. Nobody but you is so respected in both camps.’

  ‘I’m respected in both camps,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ said Burlingame.

  ‘With Meinong missing, it’s the perfect time,’ said Whelt. ‘A few days from now we could be free.’

  Burlingame didn’t answer right away. Whelt watched her dispassionately, knowing he’d done all he could, which was not very much. Whatever she decided, it wouldn’t be because of the strength of an argument. That was never the reason. When he was younger he’d put such faith in arguments, the logical deployment of the relevant facts of the case, as if those could be isolated without difficulty. You wade chest-deep through a swamp without end and every so often you peel off whatever happens to be clinging to you and you call those the relevant facts.

  Burlingame nodded. ‘We’ll start today,’ she said.

  *

  When the soldiers brought Trimble into Atwater’s quarters for his audience with the colonel, the room was so shadowy that he could make out only part of the figure on the bed, corpulent, bald-headed, smelling of slow death. The figure lifted a bowl to splash cool water on a face that was golden in the half-light, with puffy lips glistening as they formed the words ‘I expected
someone like you,’ in a voice like malaria and nightmares. Trimble was too shaken to respond.

  Then Colonel Atwater came in. ‘Ah, I see you’ve met my wife,’ he said. The figure on the bed mumbled something Trimble couldn’t hear. ‘She thought you’d come to give her a lymphatic drainage massage. No, honey, this is the prisoner. The man from Tegucigalpa’s been delayed a day or so.’ More mumbling. ‘Yes, he’ll be Honduran. But he has a qualification. I’m sure his methods are sound.’ The colonel turned to Trimble. ‘Don’t be alarmed. My wife’s just going through a few, best way to say it, temporary metabolic side effects from a medicine called – tell me the name again, honey?’

  ‘Theorozole,’ said Atwater’s wife.

  ‘What is it? Theoro …’

  ‘Theorozole!’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s for migraines.’

  ‘It’s for sexual and emotional frigidity,’ slurred Atwater’s wife. ‘They wanted to warm me up. I guess it worked.’

  ‘Our family doctor prescribed it. All above board.’

  ‘It’s untested. He has a college buddy at Apex Chemical who gave it to him in a pill bottle with no label.’

  ‘That’s enough, honey.’ Turning back to his prisoner, the colonel waved at a camp chair. ‘Take a seat, Mr Trimble.’

  Trimble sat down and his two escorts took up position behind him. For the last eighteen hours, since his abduction from the jungle at daybreak, he had been held under guard in a tent. And on the way there, a great easing of curiosity about the third camp in the forest, which he’d always been too cautious to come near. This one didn’t have any rigid cabins like the camps at the temple, just khaki tents, though some of those were as large as marquees and all of them looked as if they could bear up in a storm. Also there were latrines, generators, lamps, radios, cookstoves, chainsaws, mosquito nets and various other modern conveniences in good working order. He guessed about half of the soldiers at the camp were Pozkitos, but many others had lighter or darker skin, and he’d noticed a few white officers who could have been American. The whole place had the atmosphere of bona fide military discipline that Meinong had never quite managed to bolt into place at the New York camp before his timely demise.