by Ned Beauman
‘That statement they want me to sign is a lie. If you read it you’d think nothing happened worth remembering. I’m going to tell the tribunal the truth.’
‘Classified proceedings in a closed courtroom. You’ll be telling the truth to a handful of people who already know and don’t especially care. And in any case, the tribunal will never begin because you’ll never make it through all the evidence. You’re not doing it for the tribunal. You don’t need the tribunal. You’ve already sentenced yourself. This is a penance, isn’t it?’
For the flight to Tegucigalpa I brought with me Zonulet’s old Scribner’s edition of Leibniz. Zonulet brings the old Saxon up so often that I thought if I read it I might get a little insight into his thinking. I found a passage underlined in which Leibniz says that ‘every mind is like a world apart, independent of every other created thing, expressing the infinite, expressing the universe. So every mind is as eternal and absolute as the universe itself.’ To Leibniz I suppose that was a description of the glory of the soul. To me, at least in certain moods, it is a description of a hell to which we are all condemned. I promise I did not scheme in advance to ambush Zonulet when he was at his most vulnerable – post-coital, dog-tired, fanned by a breeze on which every scent was reminiscent of a former life – but I felt I might never have a better chance to persuade him to confide in me. And yet before he could say anything more, I found, quite without warning, that I was the one who was sobbing.
‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ he said.
‘Will we ever be free of it?’ I said. ‘Will we ever be free of the temple?’
* * *
I don’t believe Vansaska’s story about REMOTER. But I do believe that a god could be borne unseen over the hills like an emperor in a palanquin, because two years ago I may have seen it happen, not with a god of the Mayans but with a god of Manhattan …
That day I looked down on the jungle through the window of a railroad car. For many years the car had plied the Caracas–Valencia line at the pleasure of the Venezuelan oil baron Julio Méndez, but it was now suspended on steel cables between two Sikorsky S-56 cargo helicopters as they flew south towards the temple. Even though the fulsome use of onyx, mother of pearl, tortoiseshell celluloid, and other such materials by Méndez’s decorators gave the entire car a sort of congelated or membranous atmosphere, it was certainly cushier than riding up in the helicopters with the Good Conduct Division (or, for that matter, in a thermal airship). However, the car had been partitioned into two sections, and I knew it wasn’t just for the benefit of the three passengers in the fore section – myself, Phibbs, and Colby Droulhiole – that these first-class accommodations had been specially imported from Caracas to Trujillo.
‘What’s the other cabin for?’ I said to Phibbs. We were about 250 feet above the ground, moving at about 150 knots, and the wind buffeted us like a baby in a stork’s sling, but it wasn’t any worse than a ship at sea.
Phibbs’s reply cannot be adequately transcribed. Though polite, it was an answer so evasive it transcended human language.
‘Is it to bring back the Coehorn boy?’
Once again, Phibbs demurred.
I rose from my couch and walked over to the wooden partition. ‘Can I take a look?’ But before I could reach for the handle, Phibbs had inserted himself between me and the door, shaking his head apologetically.
So far, I had only one theory about what it was that Phibbs didn’t want me to see in the aft section of the railroad car. But the theory was almost too preposterous to entertain.
Although I wasn’t airsick, I took an airsickness mint from a bowl on the sideboard, and went over to join Colby Droulhiole. This was his third time flying, and his worship of the window was as fervent as ever, which didn’t surprise me – to be capable of drawing a map like the one he’d drawn for me, a kid had to have a mind built for the top-down view – he would have been an asset to 2nd Photo Tech Squadron, or, no doubt, to the Soviet satellite photography program that in a roundabout fashion had made his presence here possible. His other two flights had been in four-seater planes from Tegucigalpa to the Isla de Pinos (nineteen months ago) and from the Isla de Pinos back down to Trujillo (three days ago). In the fishing village I’d left behind a bewildered and bewasted boy; when I returned to fetch him, I found him healthy, strong, a good swimmer, fluent in Spanish, in love with a fisherman’s daughter, but still, on some fundamental level, paralysed by confusion, as if he would never, ever get over the shock of seeing the world beyond the temple.
‘How are you holding up, kid?’ I said. ‘Are you looking forward to seeing your old friends? Probably your mother?’ I knew that the gutty drone of the helicopters’ approach would already have reached the temple, a subliminal anxiety until it crossed the threshold of consciousness as an uncanny, unidentifiable sound, a fear without object, like madness. ‘They’ll all be proud of you. You did what they sent you to do. You got word back to America. But keep in mind that right now you’re working for me. You know this turf better than any of us. We’ll need your assistance.’
Instead of answering, Droulhiole just pointed at something out of the window. From a mile away, it wasn’t much more than a moth hole in a sweater; but as the helicopters ate up the green distance, I realised I was looking at a sizeable gap in the canopy.
This gap, it transpired, had been made by a team of loggers with chainsaws who had trekked into the forest a few weeks previously in order to clear a landing zone for us, far enough from the temple that their work wouldn’t be noticed, close enough that we wouldn’t have far to go on foot ourselves. In this respect, as in every other, Phibbs’s preparations had been extraordinarily thorough. The two helicopters lowered our railroad car gently to the ground and then landed on either side. For a moment I hoped Phibbs might leave the car first so I would have a chance to try the door of the partition, but of course he waited until Droulhiole and I were out before stepping down himself.
I knew that Eastern Aggregate had suspended the Good Conduct Division’s recruitment during the war, and afterwards, when corporate goon squads had become an anachronism, dissolved it entirely. Sure enough, most of the twenty men who came out of the helicopters were at least as old as I was – lots of scars, lots of displaced cartilage, but in pretty fine form nevertheless, because calisthenics and clean living were both strictly compulsory in the Division.
I also knew, however, that the guy who climbed into Colby Droulhiole’s bedroom in San Esteban was too young to have earned his stripes in the twenties and thirties, which meant that Eastern Aggregate hadn’t entirely forsaken what you might call the business of practical solutions. Sure enough, a few of the men were younger, leaner, frostier in the eyes.
Scarlet petals, blown by the rotors from the orchids that bloomed in the treetops, were still fluttering down around us. I noticed that the steam-bath air didn’t seem to affect Phibbs at all, and for Droulhiole it must have felt like home. Machetes and carbines were handed out – the latter only as deterrents against anybody with a bow and arrow – followed by powdered sulfur so we could dust our clothes against insects. The windows of the aft section of the railroad car were occluded by silk drapes, and when Phibbs wasn’t looking, I stretched on tip-toes to press my ear against the glass. I heard a thrum like a generator running, which hadn’t been audible in flight.
We set off. And for what happened next, while our party was hacking through the jungle towards the temple, there was nobody but me to blame.
From the day I met Colby Droulhiole, he had seemed so guileless, so pliant, that I just never stopped to worry he might cross me. Also, I was distracted, thinking about what was to come. Later, the helicopters were going to make a series of round trips to Trujillo, to transport, first, all surviving members of the 1938 Eastern Aggregate expedition; second, any items I wished to collect from the site on behalf of the United States government; and, third, once they’d supervised all that, the returning Good Conduct Division squad. In a matter of days, the silver armo
r would be back in Washington. I would have all the fungus I needed. From then on, I wouldn’t just visit the aleph from time to time – I would live in the aleph. Omniscient, I would be ready to correct the destinies of 1. myself 2. the agency, 3. the nation and perhaps 4. the world. On the question of 5. the inhabitants of the temple, I felt I was merely hastening the inevitable. Sooner or later, they would be discovered, no matter what I did.
That was what was going through my mind when Droulhiole suddenly took off running into the trees.
I went after him, with three of the Division men at my back. But he was too quick. The forest swallowed him up. We never had a chance.
*
‘I’m glad you’re here, Mr Trimble, because I’ve been wanting to talk to you. We had a deal. I gave you that file relating to the lady in the mental institution in Dallas, and you were going to use it—
‘Let me finish, please. You were going to use the file to, best way to say it, torpedo this initiative of Burlingame’s to stack the temple up, but our guy there says there’s been no cessation of activity in that—
‘Please let me finish, Mr Trimble. If you keep on interrupting, well, you remember how our conversation got off to a, best way to say it, uncivil start last time, and I don’t want to be uncivil to you again. As I was saying—
‘I’m sorry I had to do that, but you’ve got to learn to let a guy finish the point he’s trying to—
‘You are testing my patience, Mr Trimble.
‘And who the heck is Colby Droulhiole?
‘A little while ago I sent out a patrol to see if they could find out anything more about those helicopters we heard to the north-east. Are you sure this kid didn’t just come across my boys and mistake them for somebody else?
‘So if this kid had to high-tail it all the way to the temple with his report, and then you had to high-tail it here, does that mean that by now these men might be—?
‘What was Burlingame’s reaction?
‘And you heard all this yourself?
‘I see. You’ve got yourself quite a skill there, Mr Trimble. Tends to be just the deaf-and-dumb category who are good at that, especially from a distance. Well, you have my thanks. Like I told you, I sent out a patrol, but they aren’t back yet and all this is news to me.
‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. The intentions of this faction are still, best way to say it, dubious, and I have a responsibility to ensure the safety of the men and women at the temple. Brace up. We’ll move out right away.
‘With all due respect, I don’t care whether or not it’s your “slice of pie”. I want you with me. You know the temple and the people there a lot better than I do.
‘Do you
‘Do you want to
‘Like I told you, Mr Trimble, you’ve really got to learn to let a guy finish. As I was saying: do you want to come along to the temple on your own two feet, or do you want me to put a hook through this and drag you behind me?’
*
‘We’ve just got to make ourselves scarce,’ said Coehorn. ‘Leave them to hash it out between themselves. After all, that’s what they did with us.’
Burlingame stood beside him at the very top of the temple, both of them looking down at the clearing. On each side, armed men were visible at the treeline; on their right were the soldiers from the Pozkito training camp, some native and some foreign, dressed in khaki fatigues, recognisable to anyone who’d had the hairy experience of spying a patrol through the trees when foraging too far to the south-west; on their left, the newcomers from Eastern Aggregate, all Caucasian, dressed in safari suits. The two parties stood glaring at each other across the two hundred feet of the New York camp, or at least glaring in each other’s direction, because even though dozens of limestone blocks had now been shifted in preparation for the cubing of the temple, there weren’t many clear lines of sight between the huts and lean-tos. This spangle of unfamiliar eyes, scores of them looking in, made the day feel dreamlike to the temple’s denizens (not least to Irma, who over the years had offered a number of extravagant pledges to the Catholic God of her youth ‘if just once more in my life He sent me a man in uniform – but, good grief,’ she’d exclaimed earlier today, ‘I daren’t even imagine what He must expect in return for all this.’) In recent times, the question of why nobody from the outside world ever turned up to relieve the two camps had, on the whole, ceased to be asked – it no longer seemed to hold much force or relevance – but now the outside world had arrived in a flood. Above, the huge noon blue was paled by a haze so exquisitely thin and even that it could have been a single drop of rain spread across the entire sky.
Burlingame shook her head. ‘We’re not leaving.’
‘If they start shooting, and we’re in the middle, it’ll be like the Owl’s Head Pier massacre.’
‘We’re not leaving.’
Coehorn looked at her. Until the last few days they’d scarcely ever spoken, but they were finding, like so many others, that having lived in such close adjacency for so long was almost as good as having known each other for all that time. ‘Joan, I know it’s been a tumultuous week, but you must take a good hard look at things.’
‘I have.’
In fact, Burlingame’s thinking had never been so lucid. Gracie was gone, and she had left a note that professed love and regret but gave no real explanation for her departure. Perhaps one would normally expect to find oneself a bit distracted by this mystifying and incredible event, a bit overcome by this inversion of everything that had seemed most dependable and congruent in life. The heart could sometimes yaw the head. But in practice that was not the case. This catastrophe was like an acid, the strongest acid in the universe, effortlessly reducing all that it touched to nothing but a scummy black residue, which was the true form of most things, Burlingame now understood. After the acid flowed through, however, there were still a few solid remnants, undamaged, shining cleaner than ever after their rinse. And one of those was the temple, which the men and women here had possessed for nineteen years, and possessed still, with Burlingame as their undisputed leader. They had not gone through everything they had gone through just so they could relinquish their self-determination to thugs with rifles. Nothing was more important than that they held firm. She was almost relieved by Gracie’s departure, because without that annihilating caustic wash she might not have had such a perfect and untarnished comprehension of their circumstances.
Less than an hour earlier, Colby Droulhiole had come running into the camp. Burlingame had always joined in with the optimism when people discussed his return from America, but she hadn’t honestly expected ever to see the boy again. The original logic of his dispatch – that he was innocent of longing for civilised comforts and therefore would not be diverted from his mission by them – had not struck her as very robust. But now here he was, back in the arms of his bawling mother, after more than eighteen months away. And he had urgent news, which included an explanation for that throb in the distance unlike any aeroplane remembered from the old days. By now the Eastern Aggregate Company had become a mere abstraction, a mere ancestry, like a dead empire honored only in toponymy and legalese, but today, at last, here were the actual masters of the New York camp, in stern formation, as if they’d come not to rescue but to resubjugate their colony. As soon as word spread, most people had what seemed to Burlingame the correct instinct: they took up bows and spears, calling to mind either (if they were New Yorkers) the training that Meinong had given them or (if they were Angelenos) the spirit of the valiant rescue mission that never quite happened. They didn’t expect to fight but they were determined to man their borders. Only later, when the arrival of the Eastern Aggregate men was quite soon followed by the arrival of the guerrillas opposite, was there talk of quitting the field entirely.
‘We’ll fight if we have to,’ Burlingame said. ‘This is our temple. Why would we have stayed here for two decades if we were just going to give it up as soon as a few bullies came along?’
‘We do
n’t have to give it up for good. We just have to get out of the way. Where’s Whelt? He’d tell you the same.’
‘He’s down there filming.’
Coehorn shaded his eyes to look for Whelt. ‘Oh. I thought he might have kicked that habit after his epiphany about the diagram but I suppose this is too much for him to ignore.’ He stiffened, seeing something else. ‘My God, that’s Phibbs! My father’s assistant! It’s really him! Just the sight makes me feel queasy!’ Two babies were wailing from opposite corners of the New York camp, each filling the other’s silences, as if debating which of them was in the most unendurable torment. Up the steps came Rick Halloran, carrying the megaphone. Coehorn thanked him. ‘I asked Rick to bring this up to us as soon as he found it. You’ve got to make an announcement.’
Burlingame reflexively accepted the megaphone, but she did not raise it. ‘There’s no need. Everyone already knows we won’t budge.’
‘We will budge. We must budge. Tell everybody to scatter. Please. You were the only one who could make everyone listen about the cubing and you’re probably the only one who can make everyone listen now. Joan, for God’s sake, can’t you see what an apocalyptic juncture we have reached when I am the one who’s here in front of you arguing the case for pragmatism?’
Burlingame was thinking of eleven years ago, when she had stood high on these steps with the megaphone in her hand and called for Trimble’s censure. She had saved the temple from him, and that night love had touched her for the first time. Now love had wisped away, had perhaps been a sort of trick all along, but the temple was as solid as ever, and once again it was time to save it, to shoulder the responsibility of defending everything they had worked for. ‘We’ll fight if we have to,’ she repeated.