Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  One curiosity I used to have about Trimble was whether the other girls were giving him their ministrations so to speak. He gets what all he wants here & men want what men want & Trimble’s only half a man but I know he wants it too because you can see it in his ugly face any time a girl bends over or her strap comes untied. So he must be happy as a flea on a farm dog, I thought. But what I couldn’t figure was why he never asked me to do anything like that for him, & I know that sounds awful vain because I’m not the prettiest girl out here, but I’ve owed him before & back in Hollywood when you owe a man for something it’s the first thing he thinks of, happened to me more times than I can count on the Kingdom Pictures lot.

  Now I know why he never asked. He doesn’t want to ask. He wants you to ask. He wants you to beg. I did beg & I could tell that was what he liked the most. Last night I tell him he can do those things to me, those things he wants me to pretend Mr Aldobrand did to me, he can do all of them, so long as it stays a secret & you stay a secret too. But he says he wouldn’t think of treating a lady like that. So I really started to plead, I took off my blouse & I told him I wanted him to do it to me, I told him I was hurting for it. It’s the most shameful [illegible] I’ve ever done, worse than anything I ever had to do in Hollywood because it was for Trimble. He still said no. He said, I’m flattered, Miss Calix, but that’s not the sort of favor I asked you for. You know what I want you to do.

  I can’t do it Emmy. I bore false witness against you & look what happened. You’re stuck in that place & all because of me. I meant well but it’s the worst thing I ever did.

  But I can’t see my name in big letters on the front of the newspaper next week. I can’t have everybody knowing. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. That’s why I don’t care that we still haven’t gone home, because out here in the jungle nobody knows. It’s a slap in the face of Jesus for kin to lie down with kin Emmy not to mention woman with woman or that’s what they’ll say because that’s what they always say to us. They can’t understand we didn’t have any choice. They can’t understand our love was truer than anything they’ve ever felt in their wretched lives.

  There isn’t any way out now. Not for me.

  Oh sweetheart why did I have to end up in Hollywood free as the wind & you behind those walls in Dallas. It’s not right. Why wasn’t it the other way around. You never would’ve got yourself into a mess like this. I know you must hate me for it. You must have nothing else to do there but hate me. You must deal your hate out over & over like a game of patience. I try to tell myself different but I know.

  After I finish writing I’m going to tear this up so nobody ever finds it.

  I’m sorry Emmy. I’m so sorry. I still love you.

  Elias Coehorn Jr., Leland Trimble, Irma Kittredge and Walter Pennebaker sit down to a dinner of Eggs Pozkito with Pozkito Marys … Joan Burlingame settles an argument about the foraging schedule between Joe Hickock and Lionel Zasa … head chef Sal Delabole whisks the ‘Hollandaise’ … Colby Droulhiole stands motionless so as not to startle the diaphanous butterflies that have settled on him to drink his sweat … Kurt Meinong limps for his life … George Aldobrand punches a cougar in the nose … Freddie Yang closes his eyes to practice navigating the new darkroom by touch one last time … Gracie Calix folds up the letter to her niece, the easier to rip it into confetti, then leaves her cabin barefoot and climbs the steps of the temple, keeping her eyes down not only because she’d rather go unnoticed but also because she doesn’t want to see anything that might give her second thoughts now that she’s made her decision, except that it’s a pointless measure because if there’s anything that’s going to bring her to a halt it’s not these hungry men and women in their crooked shacks, it’s the view from the terrace right at the top, out over the other settlement and the forest canopy and the hills in the distance, never a better impersonation of paradise than in this gentle early evening light from a sky that’s beginning to turn orange, but she’s crying so hard that just wiping enough tears from her eyes to see properly feels like bailing out a boat, and when she looks down she isn’t scared at all by the drop but she knows that if she stands here too long somebody is going to wonder what on earth she’s doing (she can’t bear the thought of getting ‘rescued’ like Mr Hickock), so with nothing more profound in her head at that last moment than ‘Get on and do it, Gracie,’ she takes a deep breath, steps forward, and jumps …

  * * *

  ‘Anyway, breakfast has been waiting politely for far too long,’ said Coehorn, breaking off from the debate about how best to narrate the story of the expedition up to this point. ‘Eight months in the making and we shouldn’t delay even a moment longer.’ He raised his glass of Pozkito Mary. ‘Here’s to a good story, well told!’

  ‘To a good story, well told!’

  Each of the four took a long, luxurious drink. Then Trimble went white, Coehorn slammed his fist on the table in horror, Irma had a coughing fit, and Pennebaker retched all over his Eggs Pozkito.

  After they had recovered, Pennebaker was ordered to taste some of the eggs from Coehorn’s plate, and he reported in a strangled voice that if anything they were even less of a success. When the head chef came back into the dining room, the other three guests watched Coehorn, waiting to see whether he would erupt in anger. They didn’t even realise that this was a double blow to him because clearly he would now have to delay the twelve-month project of research into Lobster Thermidor that he’d intended as a sequel. Still, he’d always felt that one should show more good humor about the failure of something expensive than about the failure of something cheap. ‘Send the leftovers up to Master Whelt with my compliments,’ he joked. ‘And bring us something simple to eat and to drink as quick as you can.’ This wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from informing the head chef later that his scrip wages would be docked. In any case, whatever his nagging bookkeeper might say about the misallocation of resources, the sizeable write-off didn’t trouble Coehorn, because his kingdom was in such good health at the moment. ‘Now, where were we?’ he said.

  ‘The silver lining around all these clouds we’ve had tinkling on us,’ said Trimble. ‘If we’d just come here, took the temple, got home in time to listen to the United Fruit Company Radio Hour, that’s no story. But what you had to contend with, Mr Coehorn, it’s front-page stuff.’

  ‘Exactly right,’ said Coehorn. ‘We begin with those good-for-nothings tailing us here. Then something on how I had the idea of occupying this ground like an army so they couldn’t put the temple back together. Then how I’ve been propping them up for the last eight years because they simply don’t know what they’re doing out in the jungle, and they’re no more grateful than Lenin was after Hoover sent him all that famine relief. Really, Pennebaker, what I want you to emphasise is that, yes, it’s the ladies and gentlemen of Eastern Aggregate who are my guests – they mean more to me than anything and I’ve barely slept a minute since we got here because I’m so determined that everyone should have a good time – but all the same, Whelt’s gang are human beings too, and however lousy their behavior, I’ve still taken it upon myself to make sure that each and every American in this jungle—’

  They were interrupted by the head chef running back into the bungalow. ‘A lady’s taken a dive off the temple! Right off the top!’

  ‘Where did she land?’ said Irma.

  ‘I didn’t see. Must have been somewhere in camp.’

  Irma’s feet had been bare on the jaguar-skin rug but now she was slipping her sandals back on.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Where do you think?’

  ‘We still haven’t had anything to eat.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Elias, somebody may have died!’

  ‘But it’s only one of the Banisters,’ which was Coehorn’s nickname for the Angelenos on the stairs. He knew how vital it was to take the initiative at the very beginning of a crisis in terms of reassuring people that they didn’t have to pay any attention. But Ir
ma just glared at him. ‘Oh, all right.’

  The sky in the west was mixing an Old-Fashioned and below that the tree-covered ridges receded into the mist. Already you could feel the thrum of a crowd that longed to center itself on something but had been suspended in the moment before it figured out exactly what. ‘What’s everybody waiting for?’ said Coehorn. ‘The body will be right at the bottom of the wall. It’s not as if there’s room up there for a running start.’

  ‘Actually, Mr Coehorn, I think this lady could have landed as far as thirty or forty feet away from the base of the temple,’ said Pennebaker.

  ‘Don’t be preposterous – no one can leap thirty feet out into empty space. Not even you, Pennebaker, if you saw someone throw a funnel cake off a roof.’

  ‘But, Mr Coehorn, horizontal velocity is independent of gravitational acceleration so a falling body will maintain—’

  ‘Nobody gives a damn about your folklore! How many times do I have to tell you that?’

  Coehorn and Irma paced the width of the temple and back, however, without finding a body among the limestone scree at its base. So a dozen men attempted a sort of dragnet, and even that seemed like an absurd recourse, since the camp wasn’t so broad that it would be at all difficult to spot an object the size of an adult female among the huts and shelters and looms and kilns. Still, Coehorn allowed them to pick their way back as far as Pennebaker’s fantastical forty-yard line before he said to the head chef, ‘Clearly you saw an eagle or something like that flying overhead and you mistook it for Dorothy Poynton.’

  ‘No, Mr Coehorn, I wasn’t the only guy who saw her. I’ve talked to two others now. It was a woman. We’re sure it was a woman.’

  Coehorn raised an eyebrow. ‘So you’re telling me a woman jumped off this temple and just …’

  The head chef nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Just vanished.’

  * * *

  Here are some instructions on how to make film stock in the jungle.

  Abandon your attempts to fix nitrogen from the air using lightning. Even after several months of work on the copper nitrogen-fixing rig you built from spare lighting equipment, you haven’t found a way to capture enough of the ammonia for it to be practical. Yang will feel divided, because on one hand he won’t particularly like the idea that he survived a lightning strike for nothing, but on the other hand he’ll be pleased that he won’t have to risk getting struck a second time. The first time, the pink tattoo of broken capillaries didn’t fade from his shoulder for nearly a month; they were in a forked pattern just like a bolt of lightning in the night sky, as if Yang’s skin were itself a kind of film stock for photographing the storm. You share your craving for nitrogen with all the plants of the rainforest, where there is never enough in the soil. Yang will mention that if you had enough power you could use the Birkeland–Eyde process, fixing the nitrogen with a 6,000°F electric arc, and briefly you will wonder if it might be possible to convert the Indians’ dam into a hydroelectric power station, but you have neither the necessary equipment nor the necessary friendly relations with the Pozkitos.

  Do not abandon your attempts to extract ammonia from urine. Yes, at first it was as unproductive as the nitrogenfixing rig, even after you went out into the forest and constructed a ten-gallon urine tank from kapok wood sealed with pine resin. But after Upritchard is toppled by his kidney stones, you will hear Dr Zasa mention that the ammoniac odor from Upritchard’s urethra suggests that his kidney stones might be struvite stones, which is bad luck because struvite stones are particularly difficult to pass. Under intense questioning, Dr Zasa will tell you that from what he can recall, struvite stones are thought to be caused by microbes in the urinary tract, although he can’t be quite sure of that without his reference books and there’s some chance he might be mixing up struvite with cystine. Take a urine sample from Upritchard in the hope that the microbes infesting the man’s renal system are of an especially hardy and rapacious breed. Add the sample to the urine tank, along with a gallon of tapir blood which may help to nourish the colony. After about a week, you’ll find that the urine tank will produce plenty of ammonia as long as it’s regularly topped up with tapir blood. This last task is an inconvenient one because the reek from the tank will depopulate the forest for about a hundred feet in every direction. One day, suggest to Yang that it might be wise to post a guard there in case someone tries to steal the precious urine from the urine tank. He will look back at you in silence for a while.

  Discover that, when the cast and crew were instructed to hand over all their money, jewelry, and watches to bid for the services of the Pozkitos, Adela Thoisy held at least one item back. This won’t be the first time you’ve made a discovery of this kind, but it will be the first time it matters. The item is a Lacloche Freres platinum and diamond necklace given to Thoisy by one of her lovers back in Hollywood. Reassure Thoisy that subsequent events justified her decision, even though an irrational part of you will wonder if somehow it could have been exactly this shortfall that made all the difference. Take the necklace from Thoisy for safekeeping, promising to return it to her untouched, then pry out the diamonds and painstakingly hammer the platinum thinner and thinner until you’ve made a sort of flexible trellis. Heat the catalytic platinum as hot as you can over a charcoal fire, pump the ammonia from the urine tank across the folded trellis, and bubble the resulting nitrogen dioxide through water to produce nitric acid. It will take several months of trial and error to make this work, and you and Yang will have to get used to weepy blisters all over your forearms and persistent shortness of breath. When Burlingame urges you to quit before you permanently invalid yourself, reply that you can’t make a movie if you don’t have any film. Realise that it may have been for the best that you didn’t get the ammonia that you plotted to rob from Coehorn’s icemaking machine, because that source was necessarily limited, whereas this one is renewable.

  With several other men, take hammers, picks, and spades down to the drained riverbed to begin mining for rock salt. The moss and vines will not yet have had time to sprawl across the dry ground here so it will be the barest terrain you’ve set eyes on since the New Yorkers first denuded half the temple’s foundations. Why the Pozkitos decided to alter the course of this tributary with a dam, nobody knows, but the source of their seed capital for the cement and construction equipment is bitterly clear. Burlingame warned you that it’s even harder to eke out enough food now that there’s no water nearby for fishing, but catering on location is the responsibility of a production manager, not a director, so as usual you put it out of your mind. Anyway, you need sodium chloride more than you need fish. As you excavate, mostly by moonlight because of the summer heat in the daytime, you will suspect that the Pozkitos sometimes watch you from the parapet of the dam, which rises blankly over the basin like a movie theater’s projection screen. Sometimes you will hear the echo of what sounds like gunfire. The ship on which you arrived, already picked clean of every last ounce of metal, fabric and glass, will list further over to port with every day that goes by; Yang will remark that it would be exciting to film the moment it finally capsizes, so remind him sternly that there is no dry shipwreck in the script of Hearts in Darkness. When you wipe the dirt off the foggy pink crystals of halite, they will look to you like scale models of Upritchard’s struvite stones. Ask yourself whether more of the shoot’s chores couldn’t be delegated to microbes of different kinds, given that Upritchard’s former tenants are contributing more to its progress than Upritchard himself ever did before his death. Recalling that cheese is produced by fermentation, you will wonder whether there might not be a microbe somewhere in the human body that would transmute rotting vegetable matter into a nutritious jelly. You will still be thinking about how greatly preferable it would be to eat a nutritious jelly twice a day instead of unpredictable meals when you arrive back at the camp and Burlingame asks you how much food you think can be saved if part of the new mine’s output is traded to the other camp for use as table salt, curing salt, bleaching sal
t and so on. Ignore the question, which has nothing to do with the movie.

  Collaborate with the members of the papermaking unit on the production of cellulose from pinewood pulp. The cellulose they were using for paper stock is too coarse for your purposes, so it will take several weeks of experiments to improve it. Burlingame will warn you that they are exhausted, and when you reply that they are only giving you twelve hours a day, she will point out that they also have to carry on making standard paper stock, so they don’t have any time to sleep. Since you rarely if ever find sleep necessary, this complaint won’t interest you. Also, you don’t quite understand why you seem to have so many conversations like this with the Englishwoman these days, since she didn’t come with you from Hollywood and she has no official role on the shoot. (Occasionally you’ve wondered if it might be because she wants to go to bed with you; she doesn’t seem like she wants to go to bed with you, but then again that blonde reporter you met at the Spindler mansion in ’38 didn’t seem like she wanted to go to bed with you either, right up until the moment when it became obvious that she wanted to go to bed with you immediately, so it may be that there’s just no way to tell.) Ask one of the members of the papermaking unit why he is still making standard paper stock, which has no conceivable application in the current circumstances, instead of devoting all his physico-mental resources to the cellulose experiments. He will seem reluctant to answer, but after a while he will mumble something about Trimble, who is the reporter from New York.

  Render gelatin from tapir hide and bones. This process is so elementary that there is no need to explain it here.

  Ensure that, during the negotiations over the hostages from the botched ammonia robbery, one of your go-betweens surreptitiously took some shavings of silver from one of the suits of Mayan ceremonial armor lying around the other camp. Pour hot nitric acid over the silver to make silver nitrate crystals. Dissolve these in warm water, and also dissolve some powdered salt in warm tapir gelatin. (Instead of laboratory equipment you will be using Yang’s developing kit. Many of these steps must take place in complete darkness.) Using a buffer of lemon juice and soda ash, mix the two solutions together to form a precipitate of silver chloride. Separately, pour hot nitric acid over the pressed cellulose to make nitrocellulose. Carefully trim the sheets of nitrocellulose to a 35-millimeter gauge with nail scissors before rubbing them with cabbage-palm oil as a plasticiser. The first time you try this, before you realise how important it is to keep the nitrocellulose damp, you will be fortunate enough to lose no more than the top joint of the third finger of your left hand in the explosion. That day, Burlingame will beg you to stop, and you will for a while, because it’s difficult to work with any precision while your hands are bandaged. Allow yourself this interval to contemplate your situation. The moderately complex requirements of the film stock’s manufacture up to this point have helped you to understand that a frame of exposed film is like a set of encyclopedias in the sense that a frame of exposed film contains almost everything that has ever happened. Of all the possible universes God could have made, there are so many in which that frame never comes to exist, and so few in which it does, and in this context the only meaningful qualities of our own universe are those that determine its status with respect to that binary. The megaphone yell of ‘Quiet on set!’ is vacuous because it assumes a simple distinction between set and not-set. In fact, the set includes any entity that stands in any causal relation to any frame of film. Which means that to make exactly the film you want to make, to attain total control as a director, you either have to shear off every one of those causal relations or you have to extend your authority over every one of those entities. Sometimes the useful self-containment of the Hearts in Darkness shoot reminds you of the orphanage in which you grew up. When Jerome carried on hunting robins even after the matrons had fitted a bell to his collar, it felt like a triumph in which all the boys could share, but now that you’re the one in charge, you’d rather strangle a cat than let it walk through a shot. In movies, everything is there for a reason; in life, almost nothing. You got your name the same way all the other foundlings at your orphanage got theirs: a matron ran her finger down a list of Civil War brevet generals in a book and happened to stop at Jervis Whelt. You would never direct a script in which any of the characters were named so arbitrarily.