by Ned Beauman
He went down head-first, straight past the mob – fast – already too fast – and not only too fast but too askew, because he was slipping diagonally towards the edge and in a few more seconds he’d fly off the side of the temple. So he jerked himself in the other direction, but he overcompensated, and came rolling off the ramp right about where the grenade had minced Halloran.
He’d succeeded in looping around behind the mob. But some of them had turned around and raised their spears, and he wasn’t sure he could pick himself up and take off running before he was harpooned. Beside him, he saw a crack in the steps, a foot wide. The grenade had blasted straight through the limestone. He flopped sideways into the crack.
After that he was sliding again. The temple must have been more of a badger’s den than they’d ever realised, because this chute wasn’t anywhere near the one where Calix had found the silver armor and Whelt had ‘met the gods’, but it was taking him deep inside the ruin. When his hip smashed into a wall, and he hoped he might have reached the bottom, it was actually just a dogleg, and he went tumbling in the other direction, now in total darkness. He tried to slow himself but the limestone was too smooth under his palms. If the haulage ramp had been like the Bowery Slide at Coney Island, this was more like the Down & Out Tube that was famous for making kids cry.
At last, the slope evened out, and he came to rest, only a little bruised. Cursing the Mayans, he gasped for breath. But what filled his lungs was fuzzier than air. He got a taste in his mouth like soil and truck exhaust. And then he could see again, but not with his eyes.
The first thing he sees is his own death from a heart attack, in a few minutes’ time, because a human nervous system cannot stand this for long. His body stiffens, his skin turns blue, his sperm die like dogs in a locked basement. In this humid air he froths down to a skeleton in less than three weeks. He lies undiscovered until, about a year later, the temple’s disassembly is completed at last, and the workers make no distinction between these young bones and those of a dozen Mayans who have rested here all along.
Trimble sees all this, and it’s such a pity. Such a waste. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to die. Because he has what he’s always wanted. He sees everything.
He sees everything that has ever happened on this site and everything that ever will happen. He sees construction halt for almost a year after the architect, having been accused of conspiring with the enemies of Lord Kak Tiliw Chan Chaak, is tortured to death, and no qualified replacement can be found. He sees an airplane flying overhead, dowsing the forest with concentrated beams of light to trace the outlines of the small city that once surrounded the temple. He sees Professor Sidney Bridewall bursting into song from sheer joy after he first sets eyes on the ruin. He sees an eight-foot salamander with an upset stomach vomiting up half-digested chunks of a commensurately monstrous caterpillar. He sees a documentary-maker talking to her husband back in Lisbon, promising him they will be able to pay back all the money she’s borrowed, even though in her heart she has lost faith that the doomed Hearts in Darkness shoot is anything more than a myth.
And of course he sees everything that happened in the two camps. He sees things he didn’t know about even when he was at the apex of his power, even when it seemed like a person couldn’t murmur a word into their pillow at night without him finding out about it. He sees scoops, hot cockles, a thousand front pages for the Pozkito Enquirer that slipped by him. He wants to kick himself when he sees all that.
Yet he is happy, too, happier than he’s ever been, because he knows so much. He sees New York too, everything he was ever curious about there, every sin, venal and mortal, of every ‘extremely private person’, every secret that ever made someone say to themselves, ‘Thank God this will go to the grave with me.’ He sees Arnold Spindler’s affair with Ada Coehorn, and Elias Coehorn Sr.’s rape of Arnold Spindler’s wife, and the two sons, the bastard and the cuckoo. If only he could have put this stuff in the gossip column of the Evening Mirror. What a story.
But for the first time Trimble realises that maybe deep down he never cared all that much about ink on paper, at least not for its own sake – that maybe newspapers were only a useful racket for opening doors, cozying up to sources, rewarding the cooperative and punishing the rest, so you could find out more, know more, know what others didn’t, which is all that matters in the end, even more than getting even. He may have only a couple more minutes to live, but it’s not a pity after all, it’s not a waste, because somehow it’s time enough for all the gossip in the universe, now and forever. He’s in paradise.
* * *
I don’t want to write any more. But Vansaska is forcing me. She says it would be an ugly place to stop, both for my subjects – arrested in their ‘thrilling interval of weightlessness or flight’ – and for myself. She says it’s my sense of that day as the end of the story, the end of the world, that has made me turn away from the future. But it really was the end, in at least three respects. Great steel shutters came slamming down, with me on one side and the temple on the other.
First: the fungus won’t take me any further. When I sat at my desk and licked that strip of silvered cellulose, I saw everything that took place between my first visit to the temple and my second. But beyond the second, very little. I don’t know what happened to those people after November 1957. The film melts inside a jammed projector.
Second: on the most mundane level, the temple became unreachable. In my present state of health a long trek through the jungle would be a death march, and regrettably I didn’t bring an airship home with me from the agency the way some guys hang on to their service pistols when they retire. Furthermore, I can pull no strings from a distance. Once, I dreamed of tinkering in the fates of sovereign nations, but now even a couple acres of clearing in the middle of nowhere is vastly beyond my powers. Compared to the old Zonulet, I’m a quintuple amputee – hands, feet, and dick – and I knew it the instant I woke up in that hospital bed in Panama. The clean sheets and white walls and hushed conferral were a mortification to my senses because they told me it was over.
About a week had gone by since I lost consciousness in the railroad car. I never learned who found me there and saved my life, but I assume it must have been one of the surviving Good Conduct Division men. Meanwhile, somebody in Atwater’s camp climbed a tree with an antenna so they could radio a report of the battle to the CIA station in Tegucigalpa. That report was passed on to Washington, where it caused quite some consternation. Choppers were dispatched from Howard Air Force Base at the southern end of the Canal Zone, and that night I was evacuated.
The clean-up operation snowballed until it was at least twice the size of Hearts in Darkness, with coordination courtesy of Branch 9 and supplies courtesy of the State Department. Atwater’s camp was razed. The corpses at the temple were zipped up into rubberised canvas bags. The rushes of the movie were doused with Halorite 1219 and sent back to Virginia. But at the time I didn’t know any of this, because although I begged the nurses to bring me a telephone so I could call up somebody, anybody, who might be able to tell me what had happened, they’d been instructed to keep me isolated. I couldn’t even crawl out of bed because my stitches hurt too much. That was the beginning of my afterlife.
Those were the first two reasons to regard that day in November as a definitive end. And the third, I explained to Vansaska, was that it would be a moral obscenity if I were ever to set foot at the site again. ‘They died because of me and I’d be walking on their graves. It would be an insult to them to go back there.’
‘They didn’t die because of you,’ she said.
‘They did. I wanted that armor so much I brought twenty men with guns to the temple and I didn’t care what it might lead to.’ She tried to reply and I held up a hand to stop her. ‘Last year I sat in my apartment and I listened to the radio while Cuba fell to Castro. Cuba. My Cuba. Do you know what that felt like? That made a mockery of everything I ever worked for. That was real hara-kiri material. You c
ould listen to a hundred guys’ life stories in a row and you wouldn’t hear a dereliction as shameful as that. But it was nothing – absolutely nothing – compared to how I fucked up at the temple.’
‘You never wanted anyone to die. Trimble did. It wouldn’t have happened without him. He was always the one pushing, pushing, pushing, until it all went over the edge. That’s perfectly clear from your “memoir”.’
‘But I’m to blame for Trimble too,’ I said. ‘I supported him at the end. I kept him strong. I brought him those pictures. It all comes back to me.’
‘You tried to stop it.’
‘And I couldn’t. Because I’d created a situation that nobody could stop. Vansaska, I know you’re trying to be nice to me, but it doesn’t make me feel any better, all right? You can argue the technicalities all you like, but if you read in the paper about some other guy who did what I did and you didn’t happen to know this guy personally you’d think he was the scum of the earth. Those people died because of me. Any putz could see I can never, ever go back.’
And yet we were talking about going back.
Lately, the Pozkito hinterlands had undergone a series of convulsions. At the beginning of 1958, United Fruit’s banana plantations in Central America suffered the most apocalyptic outbreak of white sigatoka the industry had ever seen. Tens of millions of banana plants were lost to a contagion that made their leaves crumble like cinders (more gray than white, really). To make up for the shortfall in revenues, the company was forced to sell off most of the uncultivated land it had bought cheap in Honduras in anticipation of rising demand in the United States. The major buyer was the logging tycoon Wilfredo Nazar, a close ally of the deposed former president Juan Manuel Gálvez. Nazar, finally able to consolidate his holdings in the forests of the north-east, embarked on the construction of the industrial railroad from the cordilleras to the Río Patuca that had been his ambition ever since, as a boy, he read of this plenteous but ‘untraversable’ and therefore unexploited territory. He hired hundreds of workers to prepare the route (a few of them, most likely, veterans of the guerrilla training camp). At long last, and without ceremony, the other half of the temple was disassembled.
But Nazar’s monumental project, which began at such a remarkable pace, was no less expeditious in its collapse. In less than a year he was found to have badly overextended himself. He couldn’t pay any more wages. Tools were set down, and workers returned from the jungle with tales of mismanagement and disease and ancient, cursed, unfellable trees. Others did not return, but chose to stay and plant crops on acreage that Nazar had paid them to clear. The fiasco had still been on the inside pages of the newspapers when Vansaska and I arrived in Tegucigalpa. Nazar was claiming his own accountants had lied to him. His accountants were claiming that he sometimes scourged them with a bullwhip when they brought him bad news.
Regardless, the upshot was that when you disembarked from the boat that had borne you up the relevant tributary of the Río Patuca towards the concrete dam beneath the hills, it was now possible to hire a mule from a farmer and ride the rest of the way to the temple site over something resembling a track, without serious fear of ambush from the Pozkitos who were no longer training mercenaries nearby. The neighborhood had really changed.
We were sitting, once again, outside the cantina with the pussy pussycat when Vansaska said, ‘I want to go to the temple. We’ve come so far. Why not?’
I told her exactly why not. I warmed up with the practical reasons: decrepitude on my part, inexperience on hers, better men than you and I have not returned alive etc. The trouble was that Nazar’s frontiersmen had eased the situation. After that I moved on fleetly to the judicial reasons: how would it look to the tribunal if I not only fled the state of Virginia but actually returned to the scene of the crime? The trouble was that Vansaska knew I didn’t really care about the tribunal any more. So I climaxed with the moral reasons. That was a pretty unfamiliar field for me, a field in which I could only be regarded as an amateur, as if I’d taken up the piano late in life. But the moral reasons did the trick.
‘I don’t agree with you,’ she said. ‘But it’s not my place to overrule you. I just hope you remember when it was the other way around. When you were trying to convince me to take the cure. Go to the jungle, breathe the air, drink the water, get a new lease on life. But I was too low to listen.’
‘I remember.’
It was time to leave San Esteban. Although I felt such fond nostalgia for all the happy days I’d passed in this wonderful burg that I practically wept to tear myself away from the place, our business here was concluded. We were walking back to Le Sphinx to say our goodbyes to Wilson when Vansaska said, ‘If you don’t believe in the Mayan gods, then you don’t believe in the diagram.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t believe the diagram was the trap. The trap that caught Whelt, Coehorn, you, me, everybody. That kept hold of all of us for years.’
‘I shouldn’t be on that list,’ I said. ‘I never even heard of the place until ’56.’ I had got myself into one of those cycles where every time you wipe the sweat from your eyes it just makes them sting worse.
‘Yes, you did. In ’38. At that meeting in Bev’s office, remember? Trimble was there too. And over the next eighteen years you made it as far down as Havana. The right bearing, and only a few hundred miles to go.’
‘Listen here—’
Vansaska waved me off. ‘All right, all right. So you weren’t consciously aware of the temple until ’56. You weren’t consciously moving closer to it. But after ’56 you were as enthralled as the rest of us. Why? Why did it have that power? Why were we so compliant? The temple brought us nothing but madness. Why didn’t we try to escape? There was nothing stopping us. If the diagram wasn’t bending our wills towards the temple, why did we make so little effort to get away from it?’
‘Maybe madness was just what we wanted,’ I said. ‘We’d been hankering for it all our lives and the temple gave it to us and we loved it for that.’ I stopped walking. Vansaska overshot me by a few paces before she stopped too and turned back. We were observed by a woman who was bleeding turtles dry for cooking by stringing them up from nails hammered into the timber of an unfinished frame house; they swung in the breeze like the leaders of some thwarted reptilian coup.
‘What is it?’ Vansaska said.
As I spoke, I had come to a realisation, one that was unwelcome but unavoidable. In the ranking of potential trespasses, failures and negligences that still lay in my future, a new disfavorite had asserted itself. If I was to be quartered like a regicide by my obligations, one horse had pulled decisively ahead. I sighed. ‘You’ve got to see it, sweetheart. After everything that’s happened, you’ve got to see it. It’s not there any more but I think if you stand in the right place you’ll see it all the same. We’ll go. I’ll take you.’
‘A few minutes ago you were talking like it would be a crime to go back there.’
‘Yes. It will be. For me. A dirty crime. But I’m not going to make you go home without seeing the temple just so I can tell myself I’m keeping clean. I won’t be as selfish as that.’
So we went up the river.
Hiring a diesel boat was like hiring a truck, meaning we got both the vessel and a local skipper who knew the route better than I did. We set off north-east with enough fuel and provisions for a round trip to the temple site, which I estimated would take ten to twelve days. I felt no excitement about heading back into the jungle, but Vansaska was seeing it all for the first time: the villages that sloped amphibiously into the shallows where most of the fishing and washing and playing was done; flashes of color amongst the houses, a printed calico dress or a spectacular heap of cashew apples or a Coca-Cola emblem torn from an old carton and pasted up on a wall; the traffic on this great boulevard, canoes and alligators and tucuxi dolphins and sometimes horses forced to swim from bank to bank; later, no villages, just abandoned grass huts and clay ovens, or once in a while a prospector’s co
ttage snarled up in rusting barbed wire; and later no huts, just white-faced monkeys swinging from tree to tree as they followed the boat, and flamingoes squatting over their nests, and toads the size of boxing gloves; and trees almost slipping off the bank like a crowd pressed up to the edge of a subway platform.
‘So how do you like the jungle?’ I asked on the morning of the second day. Vansaska glared at me because she knew I was making fun of her: for about the first ninety minutes of the voyage she had been an eager tourist, pointing out every novelty on the shore, scribbling notes in her diary, but quite soon her spirits had wilted, and since then she had almost entirely narrowed her purview to the fragile microclimatic intersection of her sun hat, her hand fan, and her mosquito net. Last night, at the camp we’d pitched, she’d been kept awake past dawn by noises in the trees.
‘I do not like it as much as perhaps I thought I was going to like it,’ she answered me primly.
Twice on the banks I saw blocks of limestone, one propping up a jetty, the other diverting a waterfall, and I knew where they’d come from because under their coats of moss I could make out not only carvings but also, the second time, what I thought was a painted serial number. From the Mayan cities to Nazar’s railway, from Erlösungfeld to San Esteban, all human attacks on the jungle would eventually falter, and the wounds would eventually heal; but sometimes the shrapnel still itched under the skin.
After six days we came to the last navigable stretch of the tributary before the dam kinked its course. We tied up the boat and disembarked. These days the dam was leaky, and the basin Whelt had mined for rock salt was now a swamp, but a few spars of the Hearts in Darkness steamer could still be seen poking up out of the brown water. Vansaska stood staring at them for several minutes before we continued. From then on, her vigor was restored. She was tired and filthy and sunburned and bug-ravished and she had an irritation in her left armpit that was almost certainly fungal, but it might as well have been her wedding day.