Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  Nevertheless, she knew that she ought to look chastened in case her editor thought he hadn’t made his point. So she said, ‘All right, boss,’ and stared at the floor. The meeting soon came to a close, and afterwards we all agreed that Pomutz had been in an unusually pleasant mood today.

  *

  ‘They’ll have to cut the narration at the start of the script, won’t they?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All this stuff about the jungle.’

  ‘It’s straight from the book.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘It gives a literary feel.’

  ‘A literary feel? Have you read it? “Implacable, impenetrable, imperial – half a million acres of darkness and disease – a sheer wall against which men have hurled themselves since the time of Cortez the Killer – the mighty Honduran jungle …” Do people really need to hear this? Do they really have to hear that it’s hotter than hell and the vines make you trip and the fish swim up your piss-hole?’

  ‘Does it actually say the fish swim up your piss hole?’

  ‘In the narration? No.’

  ‘We should use that. “The mighty Honduran jungle, where fish swim up your piss-hole.”’

  ‘Now that I come to think of it, that might be the Amazon. About which this whole place is nursing an inferiority complex. “Half a million acres”, like that’s supposed to be a lot. In any case, every man, woman and child in America saw Congo Cavalcade. Too Hot to Handle. The New Adventures of Tarzan.’

  ‘Nobody saw The New Adventures of Tarzan.’

  ‘Okay, but the point being, they’ve seen hundreds of these movies. The older ones probably still remember Teddy Roosevelt going to look for the River of Doubt. They know the jungle’s a nasty place. We don’t have to tell them again.’

  ‘First of all, folks never tire of being reminded that the jungle is a nasty place. It renews their appreciation for the air conditioning in the theater. Second, you can’t just rely on allusion to previous movies to do the work you don’t want to do yourself. We have to establish that the jungle is a nasty place in Hearts in Darkness. Just because the jungle’s a nasty place in Congo Cavalcade, that doesn’t mean it’s a nasty place in Hearts in Darkness, because Congo Cavalcade is not a part of our movie.’

  ‘But it’s the same jungle!’

  ‘It’s a new jungle every time. The world of our movie doesn’t exist until the instant the first reel starts. Nothing carries over. The opening narration is Genesis. Every poisonous fern is still dewy with vernix.’

  ‘So we have to treat the audience as if they have amnesia? We have to narrate every last thing? “The mighty hat, a fabric covering for the head with a horizontal brim.”’

  ‘People have seen hats for themselves. They haven’t seen the Río Patuca for themselves.’

  ‘Neither has Q. Bertram Lee! The narration is a writer who’s never been to the jungle explaining to everybody else what the jungle is like. What the hell is the point of that?’

  ‘What about you, Mr Trimble? I assume you’re a moviegoer. What do you think?’

  Trimble looked up. He’d been watching the tucuxi dolphins twirling in the wake of the boat up ahead like overheated kids in the spray from a streetcorner hydrant, their skins the mottled pink of a dog’s hairless belly.

  Assuming they were keeping to schedule, by now they must be almost at the site. One of the men out on the upper deck was the first assistant director and the other was the second assistant director but he wasn’t sure which was which. ‘Don’t you Hollywood guys have test screenings to settle this kind of thing?’ he said.

  The day after the gossip column of the New York Evening Mirror had led with Trimble’s item about Frank Parker getting kidnapped from an octopus-wrestling match by a couple of mafia zbyszkos, he had taken a phone call from a contact who tended bar at the Goldilocks warning him that he ought to get out of town in a hurry. Apparently, Parker had been unhappy about the harm the item had done to his reputation as a nice Christian boy. In fact, he’d been so unhappy about the harm the item had done to his reputation as a nice Christian boy that he’d sworn to tie Trimble over a rocking horse and fuck him up the ass with a condenser microphone, which was how he always dealt with people the first time they crossed him. Trimble had been threatened with violence before, of course, but usually you could either find a favor to offer as reparations or just lie low for a while. Parker was different. The singer of ‘Wherever You Are, Sweetheart, I’ll Find You’ – currently at number 12 in the Billboard’s chart of sheet-music sales in the United States – was not given to exaggeration. And his manager was said to be twice as bad. Trimble told his Goldilocks contact to spread the word that the item had been Busby’s fault, but he doubted the ploy would work because he’d already bragged to too many people that he was writing the whole column now.

  That same afternoon, in the Mirror offices, he’d overheard Vansaska on the telephone making the arrangements for her trip. Kingdom Pictures had chartered a vessel to take the Hearts in Darkness cast and crew from Los Angeles down the west coast of Mexico and then through the Panama Canal in a loop back up towards Spanish Honduras, so Vansaska booked a cabin on a passenger steamship that would sail from New York via Havana to La Ceiba in time for her to rendezvous with the filmmakers and travel with them into the jungle. She also booked a taxi service to take her to the harbor on the morning of her departure. And that was how Trimble played his prank. He hurried down to the payphone across the street and placed a call to the same taxi service that Vansaska used. After he got the chief dispatcher on the line, he explained that his sister Meredith believed she was running away from her family to a secret enchanted temple in the tropics, where she was going to become either a movie star or an intrepid lady reporter (she never seemed to be able to make up her mind). And it was important that she should be humored at every step or else she’d start trying to prise off her own fingernails again, which was why he’d allowed her to use the telephone just now. But in fact she needed to be taken straight to the Creedmor State Hospital for psychiatric treatment.

  Early the next morning, just to make sure, Trimble took the subway to the Upper West Side, and when the taxi pulled up outside Vansaska’s building a few minutes before seven, he walked over and knocked on the window. He explained that he would be following at a safe distance in his own car, ready to take charge of his sister and pay the driver when they arrived, but Meredith was certain to try to jump out when she realised she wasn’t en route to the secret enchanted temple, so under no circumstances should the driver stop the car before they got to the hospital. After that, Trimble carried on to the harbor, where he talked his way without difficulty on to the SS Alterity, and although he had no idea if Vansaska had really been delivered to the asylum, she certainly didn’t turn up in time to eject him from her cabin. In the telegram he later sent Pomutz from Havana, he explained that he’d hoped to surprise his cherished colleague with a friendly send-off at the pier, but when he realised she must have been delayed, he took the initiative for the sake of the Mirror. There wasn’t another steamship to La Ceiba for three days afterwards, and by that point there would have been no hope of catching up with the Hearts in Darkness expedition.

  Trimble knew that in the long run Vansaska wouldn’t mind about the prank. Back when he was growing up in Gowanus – back when no one would have believed that within a few years he would earn his keep mingling with the ritzies on the Great White Way – he had three teenage cousins, all of them a little simple, who despite close supervision managed to get pregnant so often that their stepfather was rumored to keep an abortionist on retainer. After a while Trimble learned to recognise the change in complexion before the girls even knew themselves. During that editorial meeting on Pomutz’s first day back, he was almost sure he’d seen it on Vansaska. The ‘mighty jungle’ was no place for a woman in pup.

  One theory on the ship was that déjà vu was spreading through the Pozkitos by some sort of hysterical contagion. That was why
the locals kept asking about ‘the other Americans’ who’d just passed through. Who the hell were they? How could there be ‘other Americans’ out here? When Trimble himself was called upon to speculate, he pointed out that once in a while a slip-up at the Mirror would allow prophecy into the gossip column when it published detailed eyewitness reports of parties that hadn’t actually taken place yet. Maybe the Kingdom Pictures expedition had been outpaced by echoes of themselves. Reports that they were about to come down the river had become reports that they already had. For all they knew, the local language didn’t even have tenses.

  But in fact Trimble was just deflecting the question. He was the only person present who knew there really was another large American party heading into the jungle, because he was the only person present who happened to have passed through Havana, where he’d heard several relevant details of a chartered vessel that had docked there for engine repairs less than a week earlier. The guy who might have been in the best position to clear all this up was Poyais O’Donnell, an Irishman who lived in the town of San Esteban. He was the fixer who had arranged for five hundred Pozkito natives to perform as extras in the movie. But when they arrived in San Esteban, O’Donnell wasn’t there. He’d left a message for Jervis Whelt, the young director, saying that he’d been called away on urgent business but everything had already been settled with the Pozkitos. So they couldn’t ask him to solve the mystery of ‘the other Americans’.

  In addition to ten actors and four actresses, the Hearts in Darkness crew was as follows: director, first assistant director, second assistant director, unit production manager, cinematographer, dialogue assistant, script clerk, head cameraman, two assistant cameramen, crane operator, crane steerer, gaffer, assistant gaffer, key grip, two assistant grips, pace man, two electricians, sound engineer, assistant sound engineer, sound-boom man, sound-cable man, hackle man, assistant hackle man, special-effects man, prop man, assistant prop man, set dresser, assistant set dresser, fixture man, carpenter, assistant carpenter, painter, make-up man, assistant make-up man, wardrobe man, assistant wardrobe man, hairstylist, assistant hairstylist, two stuntmen, animal handler, developer, projectionist, fireman, still photographer, accountant, secretary, doctor, dentist, head chef, executive chef, two kitchen assistants, store man, assistant store man, interpreter, two accommodations men, laundry man, and two personal assistants to members of the cast. Though called ‘men’ by studio convention, fifteen of the crew were women. There was also Trimble, which made a total of seventy-nine people now disembarking from a ship here at the dicy headwaters of this tributary of the Río Patuca.

  ‘I’m not going to bother about learning everybody’s names,’ one of the actresses had declared. ‘We won’t be out here long enough and there are too many of us.’ But Trimble had not only learned all the names, he’d opened a file under each one. That was just how his brain worked. By his reckoning, seventy-nine was round about how many people there were in New York who were famous enough that on a slow day they could get into the gossip column just for having a birthday party. None of the Hearts in Darkness crew would ever warrant a place in the stories he’d take home to the Mirror, but when he overheard something juicy about a carpenter or a kitchen assistant, he couldn’t just disregard it. Until this trip, Trimble had never in his life traveled further than Atlantic City. Perhaps he should have been intoxicated by the ‘mighty jungle’. But in fact he didn’t particularly notice the difference. What interested him was people. Everything else was just wallpaper.

  At least fifty of the natives were supposed to meet them and unload the ship, but so far there was no sign of anyone at all, although the greenery was so thick that the entire population of Staten Island might have been hanging back just out of sight and you wouldn’t have had the least idea. About half the expedition was milling around on the slippery bank and the other half was still on deck. Most were dressed for a normal summer day on the studio lot, and an uncaptioned photograph of the scene might have been taken to show a pleasure cruise that had veered psychotically off course. As Trimble ambled down the gangway he found Whelt in a huddle with his prime minister and his pope: Kermit Rusk, the unit production manager, and George Aldobrand, the Englishman who played Coutts’s sister’s ex-fiancé, the male lead role in Hearts in Darkness.

  ‘Either O’Donnell gave the wrong instructions or they didn’t understand him properly,’ Rusk was saying. ‘But they must be waiting for us at the pyramid.’ People sometimes still called it that even though everyone knew by now that it was not a pyramid but rather had two stepped sides and two sheer vertical sides; strictly speaking it was a triangular prism. ‘We’ll send a few guys down there to fetch them.’ He had one of those phlegmy voices that makes it impossible to concentrate on what a guy is saying when you first meet him because you’re so busy mentally imploring him to clear his throat.

  ‘Without guides?’ said Whelt.

  ‘The map shows the site is due east from these headwaters. Not too far. In the meantime we put everybody back on the ship to make sure nobody wanders off.’

  ‘I’m not getting back on that blasted ship,’ said Aldobrand.

  Some of the cast, knowing that Trimble was the only American reporter for a hundred miles and they would otherwise be entirely lost to the press for the duration of the shoot, had already begun to make subtle bids for his attention. But not Aldobrand so far. Back in Bournemouth, he’d been an aspiring music-hall performer whose manager had dropped him on the basis that he was ‘too handsome to be funny’. From the time he arrived in Hollywood, however, the legend was that he had never been turned down for a single part. He had a scene in Hearts in Darkness in which he had to put on a bow tie while he delivered a complicated monologue to the actress playing Coutts’s sister Marla, and although for the most part Whelt had conducted his script rehearsals with no props or costumes, the dialogue assistant had insisted that Aldobrand use an actual Gieves & Hawkes to run through that scene, because on The Big Shakedown the atmosphere of professionalism and respect that was so important to a functioning movie set had never quite recovered after they all found out far too late that Charles Farrell wasn’t capable of emitting anything more than guttural moans while he was in the process of tying his shoelaces. As it turned out, though, Aldobrand had to be coached to tie his bow tie much more slowly, and with both hands instead of just one. Otherwise it was unsettling to watch, everyone said.

  ‘With all due respect, Mr Aldobrand, do you want to unload the vessel yourself?’ said Rusk.

  ‘We’ve been traveling for aeons. These people want nothing more than to see for themselves what we’ve had our hearts set on all this time.’ By this stage of the afternoon there was such a limpness to the way people fanned their faces and waved away mosquitoes that the crowd seemed to waggle like a giant sea anemone.

  Rusk nodded at the director. ‘It’s your decision, Mr Whelt.’

  Whelt did not seem to Trimble like a guy who was good at adapting to unexpected circumstances. ‘Maybe we should just wait here,’ Whelt said. ‘The natives may be on their way.’

  ‘Wait?’ said Aldobrand. ‘For how long? No. If that was the prevailing attitude around here, this temple would never have been found in the first place. Anyway, the insects won’t be so bad once we get away from the water.’ He took the megaphone Rusk had been carrying and raised it to his mouth. ‘Listen, everyone: our concierges may not have arrived yet but we’re bally well pressing on! Bring whatever you feel like carrying. Everything else we’ll send for later.’ There was a smattering of applause.

  So behind a drillbit of machetes they tramped into the jungle. Trimble found himself near the front next to Myslowitz, the emigré set dresser, who kept grumbling that back in Germany, because of ‘that hochstapler’ Leopold Jessner and his productions of Shakespeare, the fashion had been for every single play to be performed up and down a flight of steps, and he had looked forward to escaping such inanity forever in the United States, only to get hired by this movie of all mov
ies. But the general good humor lasted far longer than Trimble would have predicted, and Aldobrand moved up and down the line giving encouragement: ‘Remember, we’re almost the first white men ever to set eyes on this place. You can tell your grandchildren that.’ Someone voiced a flight of fancy about a gang of Hottentot adventurers coming across the stump of St Patrick’s Cathedral in a thousand years’ time. After about half a mile, when their destination began to rise into view between the towering kapok trunks, there was pointing and hooting. And if it was possible for the seventy-nine to believe that their supposed precursion by the ‘other Americans’ was merely a trick of the light, the intruder that is just your own reflection in the mirror at the end of the gloomy corridor, then it was possible, too, to believe that the ruins had been folded in on themselves by some refractory property of the tropical air. So that was what they told one another until the evidence of their senses became so hard to deny that even Aldobrand fell silent.

  There was only half a temple.

  And over the sifting and popping and nagging and burping of the forest, they could hear the sound of a jazz band.

  In those early days not a lot of people thought to ask themselves why the Pozkitos decided to interpret Coehorn’s vague instructions by completely dismantling one of the temple’s two great staircases before moving on to the other, rather than just starting at the capstone and working their way to the bottom. After all, the two approaches would expend about the same amount of labor, and to a ‘civilised’ mind that has been taught to trust the symmetrical and distrust the arbitrary, it would feel much more logical to take it, as musicians say, from the top. But a few days later, when a story started going around of a Pozkito boy who had been seen to eat one whole hemisphere of a papaya before starting on the other (instead of working his way around the equator as if it were an apple) this may have added some weight to the theory that the Pozkito people had some sort of racial disposition towards bisectional progress, even though the truth was probably just that the Pozkito boy was avoiding the mushy half of the papaya. In any case, for most of the arrivals at the Mayan site, the events of those first few days were so unexpected that they didn’t pause for much geometrical analysis. The ladies and gentlemen of Hearts in Darkness, in particular, had nothing in their minds when they emerged from the trees except ‘Half of our temple is gone!’ They were robbed of the tourist experience that they deserved after their long journey, the gut-punch of awe. Because that temple was quite something when it was still intact: two hundred feet high, two hundred feet wide, four hundred feet long, with sculptures running up the mossy balustrades and a peripteros not unlike a miniature Jefferson Memorial crowning the upper terrace where the two staircases met. And all this, impossibly, in the middle of a ravenous jungle. But the newcomers never really saw what was there. They only saw what was missing. One half was mundanely, predictably solid. The other half was a screaming gap.