Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  Trimble was a hoarder by nature. But hoarding wasn’t easy, because it wasn’t as if he had a lease on a warehouse out there. Any stockpile in a tent or cabin would have been noticed right away, and out in the forest there were no hiding places from human and animal foragers. If Trimble hoped to corner a commodity, he had to cache it with other parties, a hoard in only a virtual sense.

  So Trimble mostly hoarded what he could hoard in his head, and his head made this new ‘mainframe computer’ at Foggy Bottom look like a knot tied in a handkerchief to remember an errand. No Russian novelist ever understood his characters like Trimble understood these people. He knew the real father of your baby. He knew you couldn’t tell left from right without glancing at the notch on your hand. He knew that even though you said you were happily married back in New York, you’d actually been exiled to a rooming house after inadvertently passing on to your wife the gonorrhea you’d picked up from another man. He knew that when you told the story about being one of the only bystanders to survive the massacre at Owl’s Head Pier, you always left out the detail about using a fat lady as a shield. He knew you couldn’t go a day without chewing that sour purple leaf, even if you had to go so far into the jungle to find the bushes that you sometimes got almost irretrievably lost. He knew you’d asked another man if he wanted to be an accomplice in a rape, and then afterwards pretended you were joking. He knew you gambled with loaded dice. He knew you liked to bait your outstretched tongue with chewed papaya and then wait for an insect to land there before gulping it down like a lizard. He knew you’d been given your very technical job only because of a clerical error and so every day you gave thanks that filming hadn’t started yet. He knew you stole leftovers. He knew you would have got the monkey off Aldobrand a lot sooner if you hadn’t been so rapt with fascination. He knew you were afraid of the dark. And above all, he knew that if he threatened to gossip about it, you’d do almost anything he wanted, which included telling him someone else’s secret that you’d sworn on your life never to reveal. Furthermore, for every fact he knew that was true, he had another fact that he’d invented but that he would have no trouble making other people swallow. My old Mirror colleague had been conniving enough back in New York, sure, but still clumsy sometimes. The isolation here had sharpened his game, like a summer tennis camp that went on forever. He didn’t make mistakes any more.

  The reason it was necessary for me to abridge two paragraphs from Calix’s letter of September 1942 was that she attempted there to recount the events that led to Trimble finally taking control of the printing press. Calix was a lucid analyst who gave it her best try. And for all her naïvety, she was faster than many at the camp to understand his nature. But that section of her letter is nevertheless almost unintelligible. Who can blame her? Trimble’s project, from the perspective of any individual at the temple, must have been like one of those puzzles in a magazine where they print a magnified detail of some household object and invite you to guess at the whole, except in this case the object was not a toothbrush or a nylon stocking but a monstrosity budding in the darkness.

  When Trimble first asked Whelt if he could borrow the portable printing press for the good of the camp’s morale, the director replied that the reporter’s presence on the shoot was tolerated only for its advance-publicity value and that Kingdom Pictures equipment could not be subject to frivolous wear and tear. And Whelt was one of a handful of people at the site over whom Trimble couldn’t get any leverage. Coehorn, on the other hand, was unpredictable but on the whole easy enough to puppet. Trimble had learned how to pander to his vanity, the focus of which had shifted in this period from his dress and grooming to his qualities as a benevolent leader.

  Around that time, Whelt was plotting to send two men downstairs on a moonless night to steal a gallon of ammonia from Coehorn’s hand-pumped icemaking machine. Trimble, of course, heard about it. So he arranged for the men to be caught in the act. This was the first such transgression by one camp against another since the two expeditions had arrived, and it came as a shock to almost everybody.

  Coehorn, furious, demanded a ransom for the return of the burglars he’d arrested, to be paid in food deliveries over the course of a year. It was an exorbitant penalty. ‘When we heard what he was asking,’ Calix writes, ‘I’m ashamed to say there were some of us who were ready to leave those men to their fates down there. But not me & not Mr Whelt.’ Trimble suggested to Coehorn that, since the two men were to be returned right away, he should demand collateral for the future schedule of payments. Something Whelt couldn’t replace. Not camera or sound equipment, because Whelt would never give those up. But perhaps his printing press …

  And so the Incipit was duly handed over as a surety. Meanwhile, the ransom payments were crushing enough to invert the economic standings of the two camps, boosting the New Yorkers above the Angelenos. ‘We were already doing all the trapping & foraging & fishing we could,’ Calix writes, ‘& we still barely had enough left over to buy ice from the New York folks. Now we have to put their supper on the table day after day as well as our own. It’s a ruination to us. People say it’s like Black Tuesday all over again. & it stings double because for so long it was the New York folks who were the Okies of the jungle because they were so lazy but now it’s been turned upside down & all for nothing.’ All for nothing? Not to Trimble. Because the printing press was his now.

  Unfortunately, if any copies of the Pozkito Enquirer have survived to this day, they haven’t found their way to the warehouse or to my private archives. By the time Trimble published the first weekly issue, I think almost everyone at the temple must have been aware on some level that they were living under a tenebrous new dictatorship. But this awareness hadn’t quite condensed into speech or even conscious thought. These people knew, each one, that Trimble was blackmailing them. They knew that the blackmail was making them miserable. They knew that their neighbors also seemed miserable. But they couldn’t complete the syllogism and see that Trimble was blackmailing their neighbors too, because he’d helped each of them to feel either that their secret was uniquely shameful – that no one would ever forgive them for it because no one else could possibly be hiding anything so bad – or that their debt to him was uniquely grave.

  When they first set eyes on that newspaper, with its blurry and uneven but still horribly legible type, that was when they must finally have realised that Trimble had the whole outpost afraid of him. But the moment the possibility of collective resistance was born was also the moment its little heart stopped, because it was one thing to have your secret whispered from tent to tent and cabin to cabin, mixed in with all the other peelings and ashes of village social life, but quite another to have it set down there in irrefutable print where every other human being in the universe would see it by lunchtime. Forget the basic absurdity of the Enquirer’s existence, and the disgust with which its editor was regarded. The first time a man sees his name disgraced in a newspaper, it doesn’t matter if he knows no one will believe it – it doesn’t even matter if he’s looking at the only copy ever printed – he will still feel shaken beyond reason. This is because the setting of text in columns under a headline is essentially a magical act. I was a reporter once too and I know. Perhaps Aldobrand and Thoisy and a few other Hollywood veterans could resist the effect, in the same way that a Jivaro warrior who is hexed often enough by his enemies is believed to grow a sort of protective callous around his kidneys. But not the rest of them. If you’d displeased Trimble in the last few months, maybe you’d been waiting to see what would happen, or maybe you hadn’t even realised your mistake. Either way, here was his retribution, as public as an old-fashioned hanging.

  In both camps, people tried to denounce the newspaper to a higher authority. It didn’t yet seem plausible that Trimble could openly defy Whelt or Coehorn, and although the copy was in the same jaunty style as the gossip column back at the New York Evening Mirror, no one in their right mind could fail to see that this was a malign document. But when th
e first issue of the Enquirer was shown to Whelt, he just scanned it without much interest and handed it back, failing to understand how it was relevant to his film. And when it was shown to Coehorn, he chuckled his way to the bottom of the page and said that Trimble should be congratulated on the idea and he hoped they’d all be good sports about it.

  * * *

  September 19th, 1944

  Carrotwood Hospital

  5600 Samuell Boulevard

  Dallas, TX

  United States

  My love,

  Lyndon was so afraid it would get in the newspaper. If everybody knew, he used to say, this was before I ran off to Hollywood, If everybody knew that his wife and his wife’s niece had But he never could finish the sentence. I know you’ve already put the whole episode out of your mind as best you can, he said to me, but a man’s reputation, that’s forever. Put it out of my mind! Sure, I put it out of my mind. Put it out of my mind so well I still haven’t forgotten an inch of your body eight years later, I mean it Emmy, not an inch, yes we all know there are parts of you that if a half-blind boy saw just once through a black veil in not much moonlight he’d still be thinking on it when he died an old man in front of a firing squad but I can still turn myself over just picturing the bottoms of your heels or the backs of your earlobes or the bald place like the curve of a river where your hair parts on the side of your head.

  What I mean to say is I didn’t understand then why Lyndon was so afraid of the newspaper. I understand now.

  We all try not to read it. I promise we do. We know that if we all just quit reading at once Trimble would most likely shrivel up & wash away in the rain. But every week when the new number comes out I don’t know what to tell you Emmy but it feels like it would be easier to quit breathing than to look away. At the bottom of the steps here we’ve got a turkey coop full of jungle turkeys, they have technicolor wings & a gobble that gets faster at the end like a coin when it falls on the table just right, & one night Mr Hickock the grip was on watch when a jaguar got past him & he tried to fight it off but it took most of the turkeys. Or so he said. Well the top story in the Pozkito Enquirer this week was that Mr Hickock fell asleep boiled on yam gin & forgot to close the door so the turkeys just wandered off on him, & when he woke up he realised his mistake, so he gave himself a few cuts with a knife & then took one of the turkeys that was too [illegible] to skedaddle & tore it up with his bare hands in the coop so it’d look like a jaguar got in.

  I know to you it can’t sound like the blackest sin in the world after all we’ve been through & besides who did he buy the moonshine from none other than Trimble most likely. Mr Hickock is just a human being like us all. But what you have to reckon with is we are hungry, so powerful hungry all the time, & without those birds we’d spent months & months rearing we’ll be even hungrier for a long stretch to come, not to mention we use the feathers for fletching. Mr Hickock always used to pride himself more than anything on his trustworthiness & clean living & this is what he did. So that night, after the newspaper came out, Mr Hickock just ups & walks out into the jungle.

  He didn’t have any destination & he didn’t mean to come back. Dr Zasa saw him go but he didn’t think anything of it til somebody found a note in his cabin. So the doctor & some other men went looking for him in the jungle. I can tell you there were a few around here happy to see him gone like that after what they read in the newspaper but Mr Hickock is our friend & in any case we can’t afford to lose another strong pair of hands. When the men went out to rescue Mr Hickock I think they figured they were going in defiance of Trimble, because Trimble tried to ruin him with that newspaper. But when they brought him back the next morning all scratched up & staggering, it was a miracle they found him at all, Trimble seemed happier than anybody. He gives Mr Hickock a big hug & tells him he’ll make sure he gets second helpings at dinner. Afterwards I understood it, Mr Hickock dead is out of Trimble’s power, & Trimble doesn’t want anybody out of his power.

  You want to know if I’m worried I’ll ever see my own name in those unholy pages. Well Emmy I think for once in my life I’ve been smart. For a long time I didn’t tell the folks here anything about where I came from. Why for goodness’ sake would I. But after a while I could tell Trimble was sniffing around. He wanted something on me just like he’s got something on everybody else. So one night not too long ago I told Miss Raye I ran away from my husband to go to Hollywood because I wanted to be an actress, & I’m sobbing like a naughty Catholic at confession, & I keep saying how guilty I felt about it. Now I know Miss Raye’s done a hell of a lot worse than that in her time & so have almost all the folks here so when she’s comforting me she must be thinking, This girl’s a real bluenose if she thinks that’s so bad. But that’s just what I want, because now Trimble must think if he wants to scare me he just has to make a threat about how he’ll put it in the newspaper. As if I could care less ha ha.

  So you see I’m clear of Trimble pretty much. I still do a chore for him once in a while but not because I have to. Oh Emmy my conscience you want to know how I can still do anything for that man now we’ve all seen him for what he is. But you should’ve seen me last week when I put on the lipstick he gave me, not the Okie lipstick we make out of achiote seeds but I mean real Max Factor, I don’t know how there’s still real Max Factor in this jungle after 6 years, & of course I couldn’t put it on in the camp because everyone would know who I got it from, I had to take a wander into the trees when I wasn’t needed. I brought a little piece of mirror I saved from one that broke, so I made sure to get it just perfect, & I couldn’t see my whole face all at once but when I was done I swear I looked prettier than Miss Thoisy, maybe that isn’t saying much any more because believe it or not Miss Thoisy still insists on going around with that mink stole even though by now it would be a great compliment to say it looks like something you’d fish out of a sewer drain, but I swear I did, & it felt so sweet my darling, all I could think was how much you’d want me to kiss you if you saw me like that, about my lipstick putting a blush on your neck. I don’t want to say what I do for Trimble but if he ever asks me to do anything that’ll be any injury to anybody I say no so I’m not as bad as some.

  The thunder outside. You know Mr Upritchard has kidney stones & Dr Zasa says they’ll pass in a few weeks but when I see him lying there with the torments of hell in his face it makes me think he’ll just up & die like Mr Rusk.

  I dreamed about you last night Emmy. We were in a dance class & the monkey that took Mr Aldobrand’s face was teaching everybody the Half Doodle & it squawked at us every time we stopped dancing, but at least you were with me. You know I was going to come for you. I was going to get things ready for us to go away & then come for you. That’s why I came out & said what I said to Lyndon & the others. I thought if I told the truth they’d be watching us both but if I lied then one of us could help the other. I wasn’t trying to save myself I was trying to save us both. You know that or leastways I tell myself you do.

  Yours forever,

  Gracie

  Jervis Whelt hoists a copper rod up towards the lightning … Fales Apinews loses the bet he made with himself about how long he could go without thinking about his toothache … Leland Trimble gropes for a dropped apostrophe … Rick Halloran decides to abandon his attempt to make a mousetrap from the sprung jaw of a piranha … Joan Burlingame deseeds a chili pepper … Keith Upritchard longs for death … Carl Ivo walks down to the river intending to go fishing, but finds, instead, an empty basin, a stranded ship, and a great concrete dam … Gracie Calix folds up the letter to her niece and puts it in her jewelry box …

  He read the letters

  Emmy he read the letters

  OH GOD EMMY he read the letters

  He’s been reading them ever since I’ve been writing them. I was SO STUPID Emmy. My jewelry box. Why did I think

  I wasn’t sending them anyway & I wasn’t ever going to so why didn’t I just burn them or

  [illegible]

 
Last night he came to me when I was on my own & he says he has a little favor to ask. I thought it was just going to be some tattle about somebody like usual. I guess it was but not like usual. He wants me to say Mr Aldobrand misused me. Came up behind me out in the trees & put a stake to my throat & misused me. He tells me all the different ways I’m supposed to say Mr Aldobrand did it & it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard in my life.

  I know why. We all like Mr A. so much & Mr Aldobrand never does anything wrong so he’s near enough the only man here who could still stand up to Trimble if he ever was disposed to.

  I say, No Mr Trimble I’m not going to do it, Mr Aldobrand never did anything to me, I don’t care how much ice & lipsticks you’ve got this time. And he smiles & says, But Miss Calix we all know nobody will touch Mr Aldobrand because of his face & by now he’s as rucked & twisted on the inside as he’s rucked & twisted on the outside, you haven’t paid attention to how he looks at you dames lately but if you do this thing for me you’ll be saving some sister of yours from the inevitable when Mr Aldobrand just can’t hold it any more. And I shake my head & tell him to get out of my cabin, I can hardly speak I’m still so sick to my stomach from all his filthy talk. But then he says, You know you’d be in quite a jam if word was to get out about you & your niece. I wouldn’t want to see you in a jam Miss Calix. We’ve always got along so well.

  He knows Emmy. He knows all of it near enough.