Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘What does any of this have to do with me?’ said Coehorn.

  ‘I want this temple. You are going to fetch it for me. Preparations have already begun for an expedition to Spanish Honduras. A crew of native laborers will disassemble the temple, after which it will be carried out of the jungle stone by stone, loaded aboard a number of ships, brought to New York, repaired of its long neglect, and reassembled on the grounds of Braeswood where the north firefly pavilion currently stands. You will be in command of this entire endeavor.’

  Coehorn smiled. ‘I’m about as likely to bring you back a basket of roc eggs from the Cape of Good Hope.’

  ‘You are twenty-six years old, boy. I don’t have to tell you again what I had already accomplished by the time I was your age. I have allowed you to waste all these years in your circus of jockers and dope addicts in the expectation that you would tire of such divagations of your own accord. But that has not happened. Enough is enough. Perhaps you were expecting that one day I would offer you the vice presidency of the radio division or some other puerile sinecure. But instead you are going to do some real work for a few weeks.’

  ‘If the French archaeologists were delirious, how do you know these ruins are even real?’

  ‘Their account of the temple was specific and plausible. This is not the architecture of delirium. I can assure you that unlike the Frenchmen you will be in no physical peril as long as you are not too careless.’

  In the past, a direct order from his father would have been like a tentacle around Coehorn’s throat, but these days he felt more confident. ‘I’m afraid I have a prior engagement forever so I’ll have to decline. A pleasure to see you, Father, as always.’

  ‘You will do as I say or the money stops.’

  ‘That’s not much of a threat because you never give me any money as it is. I’ve learned to manage perfectly well on my own.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Phibbs, ‘over the last twelve months your father has deposited nearly twenty thousand dollars in your bank account.’

  Coehorn smiled and shook his head. ‘No, that is certainly not the case.’

  ‘Yes, sir, it is,’ said Phibbs.

  ‘But it can’t be because I’m skinned out all the time.’ Sometimes they let him make a withdrawal and sometimes they didn’t but he never bothered to check the balance on the account.

  ‘Whether or not you admit the existence of your allowance, you will have no more of it to spend.’

  ‘There’s a trust. Mother made sure of it. I know what I’m owed. I’ll sue.’

  ‘You are owed nothing. No lawyer will represent you. However: this is the last condition I shall ever set. For all I care you can convert to Kropotkinism afterward, or bigamize with a couple of Eskimo women. Get this temple for me and on your return your trust will be fully vested six years early.’

  ‘If I don’t go, who will do it?’

  ‘I’ll send Phibbs.’

  That was hateful to Coehorn, the thought of Phibbs going to the tropics in his place, because a direct substitution would imply that he was on a level with this sniveling chamberlain. More likely than not, however, his father had already resigned himself to such a swap. More likely than not, most of his father’s plans had been drawn up with Phibbs in mind on the reasonable assumption that Coehorn would say no. More likely than not, if his father had been there to watch the farce with the octopus, it would only have confirmed his belief that his son was no good for anything. Since Coehorn wouldn’t allow himself to get caught up in the sort of dreary Freudian determinism that he found it so easy to identify in the emotional lives of his friends, he tried to see the instinctive appeal of proving his father wrong here as no better than a dog begging at the table. But he couldn’t ignore his father’s threat to take his money away, to smash the only tank that really mattered. He remembered how many of his acquaintances from his one and a half semesters at Harvard had disappeared from sight after the Crash, not all at once that fall but one by one in the years that followed, like a disease from the mainland spreading gradually across an archipelago. Now here was one more dose of Black Tuesday. If he had no money to spend, his New York friends would drop him, and he wouldn’t blame them because he’d done the same to others many times. He tried to form a mental image of the jungle, but the best he could do was the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. As it happened, on a recent Sunday afternoon there he had overheard a girl say, ‘Isn’t that Frank Parker?’ ‘No,’ replied her companion, ‘no, I think it’s that Rockefeller kid.’ Coehorn was grudgingly willing to admit his resemblance to Frank Parker but he looked nothing whatsoever like any of the squinty-eyed Rockefeller brothers. There among the peonies he could feel his identity dissolving. But out in Spanish Honduras none of these names would yet mean anything at all. Not even the name Elias Coehorn Sr.

  ‘Well?’ said his father.

  *

  In Hollywood there was a slang term, bumps, for the strivers who came from all over the country believing they had a future in the movie business, a word derived from the stories of young actresses who got so desperate they threw themselves in front of studio limousines in the hopes of getting noticed by the powerful men in the back seats. In the land of the bumps, almost everybody dreamed of receiving a telegram like the one Jervis Whelt held in his hands. And almost everybody would have dismissed it as a belated April Fools prank if they had actually received it. ‘See me at home noon tomorrow Arnold Spindler,’ read the telegram in its entirety.

  As the founder-chairman of Kingdom Pictures, Spindler was second only to Jack Warner at the highest echelon of the movie business. ‘Home’, in this context, was his Bel Air estate, and he did not often invite guests there. He was famous, in fact, as a recluse and a paranoiac, ever since a near-fatal accident in 1929. An enthusiastic futurist in those days, he was not content merely to bang the drum for sound film and Technicolor, but had gone so far as to hire a team of aeronautical engineers to design and build an experimental non-rigid thermal airship that could be used to take aerial shots from static vantages at low altitudes with almost no engine noise. Instead of using a test pilot for its first flight over the Owens Valley, he went up himself in the cameraman’s gondola. But the airship’s envelope failed and it crashed into a ridge. Spindler, who barely survived, needed a series of marathon operations to repair his fractured skull. Since then he had seldom been seen in public and conducted most of his business by telephone or by proxy. There were rumors, of course, that Spindler’s brains had gone bad, like ham in an unsealed can – that Kingdom now had an addled king, and if there had been only a mild commercial and artistic decline at the studio over the last nine years it was because his deputies made all the decisions. And there were contrary rumors that Spindler was as astute as ever and the injuries had merely given his eyes a painful sensitivity to light. No hard evidence was available either way.

  So even a director at the top of his field might have been surprised to receive a personal summons from Arnold Spindler. And Jervis Whelt wasn’t a director at the top of his field: he was a director at the bottom of somebody else’s. That other field was education. He taught two evening classes, in directing and screenwriting, in a windowless classroom at the Hancock Park Technical High School, whose daytime occupants had access to such an impressive array of etching, carving and engraving tools that they never had to resort to fountain pens to advance their project of ornamenting every visible surface with a stupendous tapestry of indelible genitalia. Although he was still only twenty years old, he lectured with full confidence. He had never been involved in the making of a movie, but he understood how movies worked, really understood it, deep in the marrow of his intellect where philosophers kept their law of excluded middle and physicists their principle of least action. That was how he had invented the Whelt Rule, which he gave, reverently, a paragraph to itself whenever he wrote it down.

  In any successful story, the action must intensify in a series of five or six regular increments, reach its highest level before g
iving way to a thrilling interval of weightlessness or flight, and then return safely to the status quo.

  Every hit movie he had ever seen followed the Whelt Rule, and he believed that all the great screenwriters and directors must already be aware of it on some level without necessarily being able to identify or articulate it. When one of his students had complained that the Whelt Rule was so self-evident as to be virtually tautologous, or words to that effect, Whelt had responded by asking her why, in that case, the theaters were always so clogged with flops that broke it. Thousands of writer-bumps came to Hollywood every year thinking they could make it up as they went along but Whelt knew that you couldn’t get anywhere in life without rules, unbreakable rules, as many rules as you could find, to be hoarded as a form of wealth.

  Consequently, he felt no disbelief or even surprise that the chairman of Kingdom Pictures should wish to see him. Most likely Spindler meant to bribe or threaten him into suppressing the Whelt Rule. Spindler prospered so exorbitantly from business as usual that he wouldn’t want to allow Whelt to revolutionise how movies were made with the clarity of his new thinking.

  Whelt had no intention of muting his gospel. However, just because he was about to make a bitter enemy, that didn’t mean he would break his rule about arriving for every important appointment at least an hour and if possible two hours early. Since, in his experience, people often responded with confusion or even mild hostility to such precautions, perhaps because it reminded them of how recklessly they lived their own lives, he had parked his car at the foot of the hill, out of sight of the estate, and was now sitting in the front seat performing his usual exercises. After reading and partially memorizing an entry from the slightly water-damaged two-volume encyclopedia he kept in his car, he would invent three separate movie plots involving the subject of the entry, each obedient to the Whelt Rule (easy enough for ‘Circuit Court’, less so for ‘Circulation of Sap’), and mark them down in the special notation he’d invented with which any conceivable storyline could be reduced to a short sequence of graphemes. Once he’d done this for five entries he would try to guess to the nearest ten seconds how much time had passed since he last looked at his watch, before checking to find out the actual figure. And while all this went on he was squeezing a volleyball over and over again between his thighs. In two hours he could make greater improvements to his general knowledge, narrative imagination, mental chronometry, and adductor strength than the average person made in a whole year, and he was planning to develop a fifth simultaneous exercise in the near future. However, all this took a lot of concentration, so he didn’t notice the blonde woman trying to pass him in her car until she’d got out, walked over and tapped on his side window.

  ‘Excuse me, I can’t get by,’ she said after Whelt rolled the window down. ‘Could you possibly move your car?’

  ‘Are you visiting the Spindler mansion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you get a special telegram from him, like I did?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You won’t be able to see him without an appointment,’ Whelt said. ‘He’s a famous recluse. Don’t you know that?’

  ‘I do know that. Listen, is there any way you could take me inside with you? Say I’m your stenographer or something?’ She was pretty enough for a supporting role in a movie, Whelt thought, with limber, calligraphic eyebrows.

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Yes, I guess that is a reasonable question.’

  ‘If you really want to see Mr Spindler, I hope you get to see Mr Spindler, but I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘All right, well, will you at least move your car so I can drive up there?’

  In fact, it was almost time now for Whelt’s meeting, so he put his encyclopedia and volleyball to one side and drove up the hill himself. The woman followed in her car. At the head of the driveway, a guard looked over the telegram and asked if she was with him, and he said no. Once he was through the gates, he got out of the car and shielded his eyes to take in the view across the palmy basin. Off to the east, like a weeping sore on the flank of the sky, hung one of the hot-air balloons that had been dropping pink cotton ‘cherry blossoms’ over Hollywood Boulevard as part of a promotional campaign for a new historical romance about the Convention of Kanagawa.

  There was no one waiting for him on the portico, so after a moment Whelt cautiously pushed open one of the tall front doors. He had braced himself for the grandeur of the entrance hall, crystal chandeliers spuming from a ceiling on which frescoed cherubs aimed hand-cranked kinos at nymphs concealing their modesty with wreaths of 35-millimeter film, an imperial staircase switchbacking up to a gallery overlooking the foyer. But he found himself instead in a disused warehouse that had been conquered by gigantic spiders.

  Or at least that was what it resembled at first. The space was gloomy, unpartitioned, and strung from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with a random trapeze of criss-crossing strands like what you see when you pull a fresh wad of chewing gum from the sole of your shoe. Examining the nearest white strand, he discovered it was composed of some sort of heavy, raw-edged canvas, as if torn in long strips from a tent or a sail – indeed, an encampment of tents or a flotilla of sails, since there were thousands upon thousands of feet of it here – and that it was tied down at this end on a metal hook hammered into the marble floor. Stitched into the canvas at intervals along its length were tiny harness bells that jingled with any movement of the strand, like a dummy in a pickpocketing academy. Whelt thought of old Jerome, the ash-colored tomcat who lived in the orphanage where he’d grown up. After Jerome had hunted down every last mouse on the grounds, he’d started killing songbirds and leaving their remains under beds, so he’d been fitted with a bell on his collar to scare off his prey. Astonishingly, within a few months, Jerome had learned how to glide along like a dolly shot, the thimble of noise under his chin brimming but never spilling, and he was killing just as many songbirds as before. No human could be so dextrous, so although Whelt couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction through the musical rigging, his movements would be audible to anyone nearby. He was starting to feel pretty spooked. ‘Hello?’ he called out. Listening hard for a reply, he heard only a distant tintinnabulation. Someone else was here.

  He wanted to turn and leave. But instead he pressed forward through the strands, ducking and hopping and occasionally tripping. Further into the jungle, it got so dark that he decided to strike a match.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see me, Mr Whelt.’

  The matchbook fell from his hand and he whirled round, but he couldn’t make anyone out. ‘Mr Spindler?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the voice.

  ‘It’s a very great privilege to meet you, sir.’ Whelt was trying to marshal the advice he’d learned from a correspondence course he’d been taking called The Road to Prosperity, specifically Lesson 3: Dazzle an Important Man the First Time You Meet Him, but something about these particular circumstances made it difficult.

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘Uh, is it because of the Whelt Rule?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Whelt, it is.’

  He’d rehearsed this line: ‘Sir, I won’t be bought,’ he said. His host did not immediately reply. Then Whelt remembered he was alone in a web in the dark. ‘Well, uh, that is, I might be bought …’

  ‘Please relax, young man. This chamber is designed to ensure my safety, not to intimidate my visitors. May I ask, have you read a fictional novel called Hearts in Darkness by Q. Bertram Lee?’

  ‘No.’ Whelt made a mental note that from now on he would read three novels a day so that when he was next in this situation he would certainly be able to answer yes. Lots of people used that expression, mental note, but Whelt’s mental notebook had the tangibility and permanence of a physical object.

  ‘Kingdom Pictures is making a motion picture out of Hearts in Darkness,’ said Spindler, who had a voice of such chocolate-malt warmth that somehow it made Whelt feel almo
st safe here. ‘But there isn’t a single director under contract with Kingdom who has any new ideas at all. So I decided to look around for a young buck. I heard about your Whelt Rule, and I thought to myself, this boy already understands more about motion pictures than most directors ever will. Anyone can frame a shot, but not just anyone can tell a story. Mr Whelt, I want you to direct Hearts in Darkness for me. Understand?’

  Whelt didn’t know what else to say but, ‘Yes, Mr Spindler.’

  ‘The picture ought to sit somewhere between It Happened One Night and Too Hot to Handle. Let me explain the scenario. There’s a rich gadabout lad named Coutts who isn’t interested in anything but champagne and roulette and dancing the Half Doodle with popsies. To straighten him out his father decides to send him along on a Harvard University archaeological expedition to an old Mayan temple in the jungle. The months pass and word comes back that in fact what Coutts has done is set up a nightclub there at the temple and it’s now the most fashionable spot in the Torrid Zone for anyone who can find it. Coutts’s father pays for an expedition to bring the boy home but they don’t come back either because they’re having such a fine time at the frolic pad. Meanwhile, Coutts’s sister Marla wants to get married, but there’s an old tradition in their family that it’s always the brother, not the father, who gives away the bride, otherwise the marriage is certain to smash up in short order. So the sister and her fiancé decide to go up the river themselves to fetch Coutts for the wedding. The trouble is, there’s only one explorer experienced enough to get them safely past the natives, and that happens to be Marla’s ex-fiancé, who’s a somewhat more dashing personality than her current one. Et cetera, et cetera. I’m sure you can fill in the rest for yourself. One of my script editors asked Lee where he got the idea and he said it all happened to a friend of his.