Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  Hen took no part in it. He sulked and took to sighing again. He kept mostly to his cabin, but now and again appeared on deck, making his way forward to the prow, where he would strike a pose with his cape streaming behind him. He stood there at the very apex with his hands braced against the converging sides and his head thrust forward and cleaving the wind like a figurehead. He mused on the throne of Atlantis, and the crowned skulls of the ten princes, utterly lost in the mud many fathoms beneath his feet. He felt his isolation. He felt the great weight of being a living monument of Atlantis, indeed its only monument. Jimmerson and his crowd hardly counted.

  The ship was three or four days out when Kinlow remembered to tell Hen about the old man with thick glasses. Hen, who was not very attentive to the spoken word, didn’t take in the account the first time around. Listening closely to other people, he found, and particularly to Kinlow, hardly ever repaid the effort. The name Pletho did, however, register with him at some level, and later in the day he asked to hear again about the old man.

  Kinlow made an amusing anecdote of it, only slightly distorting the facts. He told how he had been accosted by this false Pletho with a dwarf’s wedgelike head and holes in his socks, and of how the man had been impertinent in seeking an audience. The old fellow made outrageous claims and obscure remarks, whereupon Kinlow cut short the blather and sent him packing, end of story.

  Hen thought it over. He had a sleepless night. At breakfast in the morning he demanded a more detailed report. He wanted a full description of the man and he wanted to know his exact words. After this was given, he questioned Kinlow closely.

  “I want to see that man’s business card. Where is it?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “What was the address on it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What amulet or ring did he wear?”

  “None, that I could see.”

  “Did he have—great personal charm?”

  “He had no charm.”

  “What did you make of his eyes? What impression did you get from his eyes?”

  “An impression of pinkness and of welling moisture.”

  “What evidence did he give in support of his charge that the Gnomon Society was infested with cheesehoppers?”

  “He gave no evidence at all.”

  “Just the bald accusation?”

  “Nothing more.”

  “Did you inspect his boots?”

  “I inspected his socks.”

  “Was he wearing a surgical boot on one foot? A heavily built-up shoe on either of his feet?”

  “I didn’t inspect his boots. I can only say that they must have been dark and shabby, in keeping with the rest of his togs.”

  “It did not occur to you that the man may very well have been who he said he was? Pletho, in his sly mode?”

  “Frankly it did not, no, sir.”

  “Or very possibly the Lame One?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He may well have a younger brother, Teddy Pappus, for all we know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you refused, repeatedly, to look through his glasses?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hen dismissed Kinlow. All day long he paced the forward deck in thought. He walked back and forth in the rain, with a point of light, a bit of St. Elmo’s fire, playing about on the brass button atop his Poma. That night he summoned Kinlow to his cabin and had him relate yet again the account of the old man in the doorway. Kinlow appeared in his dancing pumps. He had grown tired of this grilling and was annoyed at being called away from the party in the lounge. Babette’s opera selections were so much yowling to him, but that business was over now and the real fun had started. He put his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes in exasperation and rattled off the story again in a singsong manner. Then he whirled about to go.

  Hen stopped him with a clap of his hands. “None of your pirouettes in here, sir! Don’t turn your back on me! Be seated! This instant!”

  Kinlow did as he was told.

  Hen said, “You take far too much on yourself, Noel. Do you have any idea of what you’ve done to me? No, of course not. Thanks to you, I am a forgotten man. I am all but ruined, thanks to your Pyramid of Silence. And now in your brash ignorance you have turned away from my door the one man who—”

  “Really, sir.”

  “Don’t interrupt me. The one out of all others—”

  “That sod? You can’t be serious. I mean to say, really now.”

  “Not another word. Listen to me. Did the bulls’ blood mean nothing to you? Think, man. The burnt bullocks of Poseidon. That was the sign. A child would have seen it. Pletho Pappus, I tell you, was at my very doorstep and you send him away like a beggar.”

  “You didn’t see this man, sir. You didn’t see his ears. You didn’t smell him.”

  “What then, do you expect Pletho to appear before us in a cloud of fragrance? We know nothing of his current situation, what access he may have, if any, to a lavatory. His standards of personal hygiene may not be ours. He’s an extraordinary man, I grant you, but he’s only a man and this is just the sort of playful approach he would take. His little effects. The genuine Pletho touch. His pungent mode. He would hardly feel obliged to sponge down for the likes of you. I should have known him at once, fresh or foul. Oh, you make me sick. I can’t bear the sight of you. Get out. Go to your cabin and remain there. No more fandangos for you, sir. Hand over those castanets!”

  Kinlow brazenly defied the order and continued to move freely about the ship and to carouse nightly in the lounge. Hen went to Captain Gomay Goma and demanded that Kinlow be shut away under guard for the rest of the voyage. The captain temporized, not being clear on just what the offense was, and in the end he had Kinlow take his meals in the galley with the cook so that Hen would not have to look at him across the table.

  Hen set off another stir late one night. He woke suddenly from a vivid dream and sounded the fire alarm, turning out the crew. It had come to him in the dream that Pletho, who could lower his respiration rate to that of a toad, had stowed away in the baggage. Nothing would do but an immediate search. All nine trunks had to be brought to his room and emptied, the clothing heaped on the floor. When this was done, with no result, Hen went about rapping on the panels, in the way of a conscientious volunteer examining a magician’s trunk. But no hidden compartment was found and no dormant Pletho.

  By the time the Gitana docked at Veracruz neither Kinlow nor Babette was speaking to Hen. Babette had made the mistake of trying to cheer up her husband. She went to him one afternoon, at the bow, with a surprise gift she had been holding back until the proper moment. It was an English rose cutting in a can of English earth—just the thing, she thought, to lift his spirits. But he saw the gesture as a taunt and he took the can and flung it into the ocean. Babette slapped his face and got rouge on her hand. He pushed her away.

  Such bitter feeling led to a separation, with Babette stopping over in Veracruz for an indefinite stay. The accommodating Captain Goma y Goma made the necessary arrangements and personally saw to her comfort. Kinlow stayed too, in a small room adjoining Babette’s refrigerated suite atop the Hotel Fénix. In the early morning he could hear the scrape of her coat hangers on a pipe as she selected her outfit for the day. They shared a balcony, where they took their breakfast together, with the harbor panorama all before them, and the marching naval cadets, and from which height Kinlow dropped orange peelings and worthless coins onto the heads of the sidewalk people some eighty feet below.

  “Please yourself,” said Hen to his two bedfellows, and he traveled on by train and bus to Cuernavaca, alone with his thoughts. He wondered if the gardener had cut back the oleander and the bougainvillea. He wondered if the maids had strangled his little dog. Of all the mysteries of Gnomonism, and there were many, none was so baffling to him as the mystery of how Pletho Pappus had gone about choosing Lamar Jimmerson and Noel Kinlow as the two men on the planet to whom he would show himsel
f.

  MAPES HAD made no measurable gains for the Society. The Veterans Administration, having looked over his prospectus and the Codex Pappus and the various works of Mr. Jimmerson, rejected without comment the Society’s application to have Gnomonism accredited as a course of study for veterans—which meant no government money by way of the GI Bill. Diplomacy too proved to be a blind alley. Mapes’s delicately composed letters to Sir Sydney Hen went unanswered, thereby stalling the Jimmerson-Hen understanding.

  It all came to nothing, then, three years of hard work, or rather less than nothing, as the Society in Mapes’s hands had actually lost ground. At the close of his stewardship there remained only two dues-paying Pillars left in the country, outside Burnette. One was in Naples, Florida, under the direction of a baker named Scales, and the other was Mr. Morehead Moaler’s group in La Coma, Texas, just outside Brownsville.

  Six big reclining chairs stood empty in the Red Room as a daily reminder to Mapes of his failure. He had bought these matching leather recliners and arranged them before the fireplace in a semicircle for the summit meeting that, it appeared, would not now take place. Mr. Jimmerson and Sir Sydney, with their aides, all of flag rank, were to have sat in them at varying angles, the ones they found most comfortable, feet well forward, this pride of recumbent lions hammering out the truce terms, popping up and falling back as the moment demanded, in the give-and-take of negotiation.

  Mr. Jimmerson kept to his old wingback chair. Nearby was Austin Popper’s chair, in which no one else was permitted to sit, not even Mapes, who had to provide his own, a stool, drawn up close to the Master, the better to get and hold his attention. This made for a clutter of chairs and tables in a fairly small area, seven of the chairs never used.

  Mapes often felt that his words were lost in all the furniture. He could keep the Master’s attention for no longer than two or three minutes at a time. There was no one else in the big stone house he could talk to. Mr. Bates was in and out of the hospital and Maceo never had much to say.

  Mr. Jimmerson had lately taken to walking about in the Temple with his face in a big book of one kind or another. He moved at a slow glide through the rooms, reading silently. Now and then he stopped and broke into a low, appreciative murmur over some happy turn of phrase or some interesting fact come to light. “Just looking something up,” he would say, with an apologetic grin, when encountered on one of these strolls.

  Mapes came to the unhappy conclusion that the Master had lost his sense of mission and had abandoned himself to the study of antiquarian lore for its own sake. The old man simply would not bestir himself. He was content to pad around the Temple in his molting Poma, looking things up in books. He offered no guidance, no word of praise or blame. Mapes felt unappreciated and just barely visible in the long shadow cast by Austin Popper. He decided there was nothing more he could do. It was time to begin his new life in radio.

  He remained at the Temple until the following spring, when he applied for admission to a school for radio announcers in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was owned and operated by an old army friend. A prompt reply came, offering him the position of dean of the school. He accepted, but put off telling the Master of his decision for a day or two, shrinking from what he believed would be a painful scene.

  But the Master took the news in stride. He said, “You’re much too hard on yourself, Mapes. We’ll talk about that another time. Here, I want to show you something.”

  They were in the Red Room. Mr. Jimmerson held a world atlas on his knees opened to a map of North America. He had been tracing straight lines on it with pencil and ruler. The lines joined Burnette, Indiana, with Naples, Florida, and La Coma, Texas. “Take a look at this.”

  Mapes looked and said nothing.

  “Well? Don’t you see? How our Temple and the two Pillars form the points of an equilateral triangle?”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “It could hardly be chance.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I was just looking something up in the atlas when it jumped out at me.”

  “Yes. I wonder, though.”

  “What?”

  “This Burnette-La Coma line seems to be a little longer than the other two.”

  “A bit perhaps.”

  Mr. Jimmerson was peeved with Mapes, who, for all his dedication, had never shown warm feeling for the symbolic forms. He had a good mechanical understanding of them but the music escaped him. Neither was he quick, like Austin, to grasp the significance of a thing.

  “Perhaps just a bit. Or a simple illusion. There is a certain distortion, as you well know, in all map projections.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Doesn’t this suggest something to you?”

  “I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at, sir.”

  “Gnomon solutions for Gnomon problems. No shadow without light. Pletho’s Twenty-seventh Proposition.”

  “The Twenty-seventh?”

  “ ‘Look not to the meridian of the land of the seven rivers but look rather to the delta and know that the way in is likewise the way out.’ ”

  “You see some application?”

  “Certainly I do. What are we looking at here if not the Greek letter delta? You worry too much, Mapes, about trivial things, and you miss the important event right under your nose.”

  “I do worry about our slippage in membership. You don’t think that’s an important problem, sir?”

  Mr. Jimmerson didn’t think so. His reading of the situation was that no such problem existed. Gnomonism was self-correcting. The brotherhood had contracted, true enough, in terms of crude numbers, but that need not be regarded as a real decline. It might even be argued that the Society was now standing at flood tide, what with the perfect triangular balance of Burnette, Naples and La Coma. What they must do now was clear enough. This particular triangle with one side perhaps a bit forced, must be enclosed in a circle, a curving line that would ever so gently touch the vertices and then continue on its endless flight. Within that figure would be allegorical values to be carefully worked out, using Pletho’s sliding segmentation scale and the compass of Hermes. Then, and not before then, the Jimmerson Spiral might be introduced into the calculations, with what amazing results time would show. The way in was the way out.

  Mapes took his leave for South Carolina. Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Bates and Maceo wished him well in his radio career. They said they would miss him but did not go so far as to ask him to stay on.

  IT WAS another spring four years later when Popper turned up at the Temple. Rumors about him had drifted in to Burnette but nothing in the way of direct and reliable reports. There was one story that he had been found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in a Joplin tourist court. Another one had him walking the streets of Los Angeles in an alcoholic daze, wearing brick-red rayon trousers, feigning deafness and living on charity. In yet another one he was said to be locked away in a state institution, where he was hopping, barking, twitching and kept under close restraint.

  Mr. Jimmerson dismissed these rumors as nothing more than Sydney Hen’s poisonous gossip. Austin had his own good Gnomonic reasons for whatever it was he was doing. He would return to the Temple in his own good time.

  A light drizzle was falling on the day he came back. Maceo was outside, standing in the shelter of the gazebo. He was watching the big cement trucks with their tilted ovoid vats turning slowly about. Popper appeared on foot, picking his way through the construction litter. Maceo followed his approach but didn’t recognize him in his horn-rimmed glasses, tan raincoat, black wig and soft plaid hat. There was nothing deceptive about the wig. It was ill-fitting and too black, and the hair was matted in ropes and whipped up into whorls and peaks and frozen in place with wax.

  “Here, have a pen on me,” he said to Maceo. “One of the new ballpoints. Say, what’s going on here, my man? New highway? Elevated expressway?”

  Maceo looked away and fell into the minstrel-show performance that he used with wh
ite strangers. “Sho is,” he said.

  “Right over the old stables. And look, the big oaks are gone too, and the rose arbor and the garage. There’s the old Buick exposed to the weather. I don’t like this. I call this a dirty shame. This was once such a showplace. That house was the architectural glory of Burnette.”

  “Sho was.”

  “I used to live here, you know.”

  “Sho nuff?”

  “Is the Master in?”

  “He at his books. Busy with his thoughts.”

  “I tried to call. What happened to the phone?”

  “Mr. J. taken it out. He say nobody ever call ’less they want something.”

  “That’s the Master for you. But what’s going on? All the curtains drawn. The place is like a tomb.”

  “Mr. J. say some things easier to see in the dark.”

  “What a brain. That’s the Master all over. You still don’t know me, Maceo?”

  Maceo raised his eyes and looked him over. “Well, I declare. Mr. Austin Popper.”

  “Sho is. Put ’er there, compadre. I’m back.”

  They went inside to the Red Room. Mr. Jimmerson was in his chair with a book. “Yes?” he said, peering up at the stranger with the grotesque hair. “Can I do something for you?”

  Popper took up a position before the fireplace. He crossed his arms and arranged his feet in a Gnomonic stance and uttered the first words of the ancient Atlantean exchange.

  “Tell me, my friend, how is bread made?”

  “From wheat,” said Mr. Jimmerson, now roused.

  “And wine?”

  “From the grape.”

  “But gold?”